


a Matter of the Blood

by WolfOfAnsbach



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Historical, Class Issues, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Horror, Lovecraftian, at least, by people, i guess technically there is romance but it is...not the kind generally enjoyed, or my attempt at such, tags aside, this...is not a shipping story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2020-03-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 01:51:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 67,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19758157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfOfAnsbach/pseuds/WolfOfAnsbach
Summary: 1920, in the wake of the Great War and at the gates of national prosperity.Poor Jughead Jones has done rather well for the luckless son of an indigent sailor. He is engaged to lovely Cheryl Blossom, wealthiest young lady in the dreary Massachusetts fishing village of Riverdale. They are no perfect match, and sometimes he still feels a pitiful love for his old friend, green-eyed Elizabeth Cooper. But fortune has been kinder to him than he could have ever hoped.Such hopeful stability is upended with the arrival of the déclassé Veronica Lodge from New York. More so when the corpse of Cheryl's twin brother Jason, thought drowned some months back, washes up on the beach with a bullet in his skull.Join to this cavalcade of horrors the dark, abyssal creatures Veronica sights in the surf just off of Hangman's Reef. Betty Cooper's peculiar and ever more reclusive father Harold. Jughead's strange dreams of an alien city sunken beneath the waves.One might suspect the assault of nightmare on the waking world. Or something much worse.





	1. shining sea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The process which lead to this was as such;
> 
> I was listening to a recording of Kipling's 'Road to Mandalay', which includes a couplet that reads: "bloomin' idol made of mud/what they called the great god Bud". This reminded me of Machen's 'the Great God Pan', which I then went and read. This in turn made me think of Lovecraft (Machen being a big influence on Lovecraft), so I went and read some of his. And here we are.

The July 4th of 1920 found Riverdale in high spirits. Some of this was simple byproduct of the general optimism and good feeling that held sway on a national scale. The Great War was ended, and all the American boys who’d gone overseas to lick the Kaiser were home at last (save a few thousand left rotting in France, but to dwell on that would be to spoil the sentiment). The world was safe for democracy, and democracy would surely take root and flourish. Once the internecine paroxysms of blood and fire in Greece, Russia, Mexico, China, and elsewhere ebbed. 

Back home, the United States confirmed with finality its place among the Great Powers of the earth. With her burgeoning industry, verdant farmland, and teeming millions spread from sea to shining sea, Columbia could rest on her laurels and at last provide for her people peace, prosperity, and freedom within Jefferson’s long-promised Empire of Liberty.

Everywhere reason and science triumphed against superstition. Old wives tales, mutterings of ghosts and spirits, were mocked, debunked, and then explained. The universe was governed by laws. It functioned like a well-ordered machine. Its workings and broad patterns were discernible and predictable. How long before some savant synthesized all man’s knowledge thus far and produced a theory to account for everything that was, from the motion of the sun to the division of the cell? 

But there was much to celebrate that did not concern the country or the world at large, and was indeed peculiar to Riverdale.

Being the little fishing town that it was, the catch was so far good this year. The fishermen paddled and sailed back to the docks, nets laden with cod and redfish. The lobstermen did as well for themselves.

The mayor’s office finally approved restoration of the crumbling seaside houses and wharfs on the south side of town and earmarked a few thousand dollars for that purpose. No one expected such an undertaking to be finished or even initiated with any alacrity, but the idea was still hearting.

Archie Andrews and Jason Blossom were back from France nearly a year now, with all of their limbs and seemingly all their minds, as well.

All this conspired to make the 4th of July a triumph for Riverdale as much as for the nation itself.

There would be a little parade through the town’s modest square, with a few of the prettier boys and girls holding up flags and perhaps playing ‘Yankee Doodle’ or ‘Hail, Columbia’. Archie and Jason would probably be asked to lead the march in their uniforms. Their elders in war, such as Constable Keller who had fought in the Philippines, would likely follow in the train. FP Jones, who had nearly died of Yellow Fever in Cuba, would not, as his penchant for lately-illegal alcohol and petty crime outweighed his service record.

The balconies and windows would be decked out in red white and blue bunting. Children would carry strips of red white and blue crepe through the streets. The enterprising youth of Riverdale would sell hot dogs and lemonade.

It promised to be a pleasant day.

Jughead Jones, for his part, struggled to shoulder the burdens the 4th of July placed upon him.

 _The Riverdale Register_ , run by the mother of his old friend Betty Cooper, had commissioned him to write a poem celebrating Riverdale for Independence Day. Alice Cooper would compensate him with $10, which was not bad going. It would be a fraction of that if Betty was not always putting in good and not necessarily deserved words for him.

In truth, he would have done it for free if Betty asked.

Right now he vacillated helplessly between ‘Grand Columbia,’ ‘Great Columbia,’ and ‘Proud Columbia’ for the poem’s fourth verse. Finally, he decided to simply strike ‘Columbia’ from the composition altogether. 

His chief problem was that Riverdale did not have an especially interesting history. Said history might have been that of any other little New England fishing village. It was founded in the late 17th century by dour Puritans, ensconced between the winding Sweetwater River to the west, and the grey Atlantic to the east. Since then, the greatest thrill had been in 1813, when a particularly unpleasant captain of the Royal Navy and his marines had occupied the town for some weeks. Until Riverdale and Greendale mustered enough militia to fight a brief and glorious battle with the Englishmen just off of Hangman's Reef, and drove the lobsterbacks into the sea. But that could only fill so many verses.

Jughead sighed. He scratched out another four lines, and realized with disgust his pen was about dry.

He had finally decided to just recount the history of the United States as a whole, and note Riverdale’s contribution to each bold episode in that history, minuscule as it might be.

“Everything going alright?”

Jughead looked up and into the face of one of those few contributions, but possibly one of its greatest.

Terrence ‘Pop’ Tate laid a fried fish sandwich and a glass of coca cola in front of his best customer.

“Yeah, everything’s flowing smoothly as Sweetwater River,” he said. Sweetwater River being notoriously and roughly interrupted by a ridge of stones about two miles upstream. Then he had a thought. “Hey, Pop—can I get a quote?”

When he was fifteen, Tate lied about his age and enlisted in the 29th Connecticut Colored Regiment. Patrons of Pop’s humble little seaside eatery were inevitably surprised at the story behind the mild-mannered old gentleman’s persistent limp: the tip of a rebel captain’s saber at Petersburg. He traditionally led the 4th of July celebrations clad in his threadbare and ill-fitting but still splendorous blue coat. Lately he claimed his back was giving him too much trouble. But he could still without fail be heard singing ‘the union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!’ as he worked.

“Quote about my food?” Pop Tate said.

“Come on,” Jughead smiled. “Don’t be modest. Quote about the war? Something glorious I can stick in this glorious poem.”

“Told all my stories about the Rebellion more times than I can count, Jug.”

“Well, what’s one more?”

Pop paused for a minute. He moved towards the kitchen.

“Well, I remember when I first got to camp. Some of the older fellas tried to scare me—telling me about Jeff Davis’ proclamation saying the Johnnies weren’t going to take any colored prisoners.”

“Were you scared?” Jughead asked. He sure as hell would have been.

“‘Course I was scared,” Pop laughed. “But I said that was just fine, because I wasn’t looking to be taken prisoner by the rebs, anyhow. So we went down there, and we smashed poor Jeff’s confederacy good.” He chuckles, a bit hoarse. 

Jughead laughed. He nodded.

“Yeah. I think I can work that into something that fits the meter.”

Pop smiled and slipped into the kitchen.

Jughead got back to work. Technically he was supposed to have the poem finished by last night. But he figured he could get it to Alice in time for the evening paper, and hopefully Betty could convince her mother not to kill him.

Pop returned a moment later, bringing two glasses of water to the table a few over.

“So where’s your girl, Jug?” he asked.

Jughead laughed nervously. He fiddled with a lock of dark hair. His _girl_. It was still absolutely bizarre to have anyone refer to Cheryl as such. Surreal. Like one of those mad German paintings with the swirling colors and shrieking shadows bent over a pipe organ and wielding a rifle or something.

“She’s out for a bit of early morning sailing in with Jason,” said Jughead.

“He’s been back for…what, almost a year?" said Pop.

"But I don’t think she’s gotten her fill of him yet," said Jughead.

Pop nodded.

“Well, alright.”

A man of hotter temper might have been flummoxed by his bride-to-be choosing to spend a holiday pleasure boating with her brother rather than her fiancé.

But Jughead was usually not a man of particularly fiery disposition. And he’d grown used to Jason fiercely and not always obliquely contesting his right to the affections of the fair maiden. And he usually just let Jason win.

Because—

Cheryl Blossom and Jughead Jones. A love story for the ages. And that was not necessarily a celebratory description. Nor, in fairness, a damning one.

Jughead had never been romantically inclined. When the other boys had reached adolescence and become entranced by the prospect of girls, more than the actual flesh and blood human beings, he’d been content to remain inside, scribbling stories or poems.

That had changed as did Jughead’s father, the irascible FP Jones II. FP was not a doting father. He was a sailor of Cymric blood, who had spoken only Welsh until he was twelve, and spoke English like he hated the bastards who'd invented it. He often spent months at sea, if not years. His visits home were brief and usually perfunctory, and when home he was more interested in the bottle than his son. Jughead’s mother had left for parts unknown years ago, taking his little sister along.

Jughead had survived on the scanty stipends his father sent home each month, and on the charity of Fred Andrews, father of his good friend Archie, and even reluctantly of the Coopers.

But when Jughead was fourteen, about five years ago, his father worsened markedly. He’d disappeared on a voyage to the South Pacific, the subject of which FP kept a closely guarded secret, with uncharacteristic reticence. He had not even told his son he was going, and that at least he always did. Jughead had simply awoken in the swaying little shack they shared on the south side of town to find a note from his father. It said that he was gone and would not be back for some time.

Jughead rushed to the docks, hoping the ship on which his father was set to sail, the _Selkie_ , had not yet embarked. He was too late. So he stood at the edge of the pier, staring out onto the roiling green Atlantic, beneath its thick waves of white fog. It looked like the clouds had fallen from heaven. The dock creaked beneath him. The water lapped at its barnacled underbelly.

He went home.

FP did not return for a year. Jughead did not know his father was home until he staggered through the door, so drunk he could not stand. He’d collapsed against the wall and slept nearly two days.

From that day forward, FP set about thoroughly destroying whatever standing meager he’d ever held in the community. He drank harder than he ever had, so that only rarely was his breath untinged with the reek of cheap whiskey. He had never been affectionate with his boy, but now they fought. Often. FP called his son a feckless, soft-handed dreamer, and Jughead called his father a pathetic drunk.

The night they both came out of their latest altercation with bruises was the night Jughead decided he was done.

That was four years ago, now. He’d hardly spoken to FP since. The man did not sail anymore. He ran with a gang of layabouts on the south side of town near the wharfs, and survived mostly by odd jobs or running now-illegal liquor down to Boston or up to New Haven.

Jughead took odd jobs where he could find him. He wrote part-time for the _Register_ , and sweet, kind Betty pressured her mother into overpaying him. He worked at the docks sometimes, unloading cargo ships or lending a hand on fishing boats. Riverdale had been a lively port town in the days of sail, but as the ships became iron and commerce concentrated in the great metropoles, its relevance had declined markedly. But the stupendous liners still surged in now and again from the ports of China, Britain, South Africa. The sorts of ships his father had sailed on. And Jughead swore by every god there might be he’d never set foot on one of those decks.

He slept sometimes at Archie’s house. Sometimes Pop Tate let him sleep in the back. Or at least he had. Now he enjoyed better lodgings, time to time, courtesy of his fiancée.

Enter the Blossom clan.

The towns first meager buildings were raised up by their forebear Alfred Blossom, a dour English heretic sailed over towards the tail end of the 17th century. In the years since they had remained Riverdale's uncrowned royalty. From their old colonial mansion of Thornhill perched up on its declining slope of sand dunes, rolling down to the turbid sea, the Blossoms ruled as petty tyrants to rival any asiatic despot. Cliff Blossom, the line's current patriarch, made his fortune from the maple trees that grew inland, and also from the fleet of vessels he rented out to the destitute fishermen on the south side of town. So had the family piled up its wealth for generations, making themselves as indispensable to the town's economic life as they were dreaded. 

There were other Blossoms, scattered from Virginia up to Canada (indeed, Cliff's wife Penelope was his second cousin of the Hudson Valley Blossoms), but those were cadet branches and the Riverdale Blossoms maintained headship of this greater diffusion. 

Principal figures as they were in the village's history, a heap of terrible legends circulated round the family. Alfred Blossom it was said, had left England and spurned the greater settlements further south because he had murdered his brother and both his parents in a failed bid to seize the family's then earldom for himself. Thornhill was a dark and decaying monolith, its deep corridors infested by howling phantoms, seeping from the shadows, and it was said that Alfred's granddaughter Prudence Blossom had double-crossed and then slaughtered a band of unsuspecting Wampanoag Indians for the stretch of coast. James Blossom had marched down the Mississippi Valley with Grant, though it was said less in the interest of liberty or the federal union than of his own glory and material aggrandizement, so that the further heaps of southern treasure he'd carried north with him brought along the spirits of slighted rebel soldiers. 

But despite or perhaps due to these tales of terror, they were the town's first citizens, and the rest of Riverdale's people could not but wonder in awe. And who among them inspired more awe than Cheryl Blossom, the family's youngest asset? 

She was Riverdale’s crown jewel, and the hopeless dream of most every young man in town. It was enough that she was daughter of Clifford Blossom, the wealthiest gentleman for miles around, and that she was latest in that clear and unbroken line. This was a town where the greater part of the population lived the lives of humble shopkeepers and petty bourgeois at best, or at worst tore their meager livelihood from the sea with net and line. The Blossom hoards of silver and gold, and the millions more in the banks of New York and Europe were thus no small things.

This would have more than enough, but it certainly did not harm matters that she was a truly rare beauty. The copper hair, the fair skin and the sensuous lips, the great, dark and luminous eyes a man did not soon forget. 

The girl had a serious penchant for unprompted cruelty, it was true. Jughead would never forget the day a drowned fisherman had been plucked out of the sea just off of Sweetwater Beach, in full view of the whole town. As the poor soul was dredged up, skin a light blue, tangled in kelp, and dribbling water from eyes and mouth, Cheryl had commented that “the catch of the day doesn’t look especially appetizing.”

She was also fond of referring to the impecunious crabbers and day laborers crowded into the waterfront shacks on the south side of town as ‘the degraded, ill-bred dregs of Anglo-Saxondom,’ amid less friendly appellations.

Still, her wealth and beauty far outweighed deficient character in the eyes of the town at large.

There was hardly a fellow in Riverdale who did not at least dream of her, and a lesser number that attempted to realize such desires. All met with failure. Besides the fact that she seemed to have little use for romance save so far as she could use it to torment and destroy, there was the stark reality of her twin brother Jason.

Jason Blossom was a tall, strong, and handsome youth who was to the young ladies in town as his sister was to the boys. On that 4th of July he was six months back from the war in Europe. He was an active boy, who liked to run and fight, and sometimes to take a shotgun out to sea and shoot sharks. When he did so, he would take not Cliff Blossom’s grand fishing boat, but rather a friend or two in a pitiful little skiff in order to give the great fish a sporting chance, as he said. 

He was not as hard to get on with as his sister, and agreeable enough, except when it came to the subject _of_ his sister, in which case he posed a mortal threat to any would-be suitor. Jason was willing and glad to menace love-struck boys with his fists or guns should he deem them unworthy of Cheryl. And Jughead was quite sure he would deem every man on earth so, save possibly himself.

But that was okay because Jughead was that unique sort of Riverdale boy who had never nursed any infatuation for Cheryl Blossom.

Their interactions, to the extent they had any, usually consisted of Cheryl sneeringly greet him with "hallo, Huck!" and ask if he was looking for Tom Sawyer or Pap Finn, to which Jughead might offer a friendly warning that she ought to lay low, for Dr. Van Helsing had been spotted nearby.

Jughead had anyhow long harbored a desperate crush on his old schoolyard comrade, pretty, blonde Betty Cooper, with the gentle green ocean eyes, who did not suffer from the massive disparity between outward and inward beauty that Cheryl did, and whose family had rescued him from starvation more than once.

Of course, dear friends as they were, and no matter the hours they spent together strolling along the beach or reading poetry to each other, he did not imagine she could ever return those feelings.

And anyhow all had changed upon his father’s return from the fantastic voyage and his subsequent collapse.

He was homeless after that, and it had been one night that he did not want to bother the Andrewses, Coopers, or Pop Tate with his misery. So he decided he would sleep in the culvert beneath the railroad tracks bisecting Riverdale. With some luck, it would shield him from the wind and the wild rain. 

That had been an odd month. The United States had entered the European war, and Jason Blossom and Archie Andrews had gone off to fight it. Riverdale suddenly felt smaller and larger at once. 

Jughead was making his way to the culvert when he rounded a corner near Pop’s and crashed right into Cheryl Blossom. She shrieked like a banshee, and he swore loudly. He dropped the pitiful cotton sack carrying his meager belongings, two changes of clothes and a journal. She snatched it up before he could.

“What is _the matter_ with you?” Cheryl shrieked, copper hair already damp with the drizzle, fair skin flushed. She sniffed and peered over his shoulder, towards the Southside. “Aren’t you on the _wrong_ side of the poverty line?”

“Actually,” he snarled, recalling their last exchange. “This ‘miserable Welsh atavist’ is right where he belongs.”

“Where’s that?” she demanded, lips pursed and eyes heavy.

“Under the railroad tracks.” He jerked his thumb in their general direction. “Since I don't have any better lodgings.” He tried to shove past her, and she wouldn't let him go. 

Cheryl wrinkled her fine nose and scoffed.

“I would ask how a human being could sink so low, but whether you're _human_ at all is an open que—"

“Well,” Jughead cut her off. snatched his bag back from her. “A human being can withstand just about anything.” He looked her right in the eye. “I understand we aren't so resilient as _reptiles_ , though.”

Then he stalked past her. There was a moment of silence, and the rain began to fall harder.

Then her unlooked for voice: “wait.”

He turned around. She rushed up to him, moving like dainty steps would keep away the rain. And she crammed a handful of soggy dollar bills into his hand.

“I truly can’t believe my own soft heart,” she said. Even as she lavished her charity upon him, she kept her face scrunched in revulsion. “Here. Get yourself a room at the inn.” They both looked up into the black, rolling sky. “I assume that will worsen.”

He stared down at the money in wonder.

“Thank you?”

“Fine.”

And he went and got himself a room at the inn.

It was the first time he’d ever seen a display of kindness from Cheryl unattended by any bleaker motive. It raised his estimation of her, just a little bit. The next time he saw her at Pop Tate’s eatery, a sort of neutral ground between the bourgeois and proletarian halves of the little town, he thanked her. She offered him to sit with her.

“Take a seat, darling pauper. I’m running poor relief.”

She bought him a meal.

“ _Noblesse oblige_ strikes again,” he said.

Give it a few weeks they were something approaching friends.

The first time she invited him to the dreadful old Blossom family mansion of Thornhill, he’d fallen in love with the grand library. He’d spent hours trailing between the moldering shelves, the ancient genealogies and catalogues of natural history, poems and novels. Penelope Blossom, the family’s sour matriarch, watched him closely, as if she feared he might steal something.

He was tempted.

Give it a few more weeks, he was her date to the little Nickelodeon theater in Greendale, fifteen miles inland, and she kissed him.

Give it six more months, and they were engaged.

That was a year ago now, that they’d been engaged. It was still absolutely insane. That Cheryl Blossom, the lovely daughter of dyed in the wool American aristocrats should want anything to do with the struggling son of a beery sailor was insane. But here they were.

It shocked the town as much as it did him. People talked about it for months.

Jason got home from Europe and was less than enthused to find his beloved sister had become engaged to a homeless writer while he was away. Jughead had not expected Jason to like him. But they got on, if uneasily. And Jason never shot at him at least, like he had dealt with Marmaduke Mason once (partly because he had missed, and mostly because he was Jason Blossom, he’d suffered no consequences for that particular antic).

He did not think Cliff or Penelope were thrilled with their daughter’s choice of husband, but neither did they loudly protest.

“What are you going to offer my girl?” Cliff once asked him, with the clear intimation that the answer was ‘nothing’.

Jughead had shrugged, surprised at his own nonchalance. 

“Reality, maybe,” said Jughead.

Cliff grumbled. “Do you have any congenital defects?”

“I sincerely hope not.”

“Mmmph. Vital germ-plasm is essential to the generation of good children." 

Jughead stared at him, jaw and lips twitching in bewilderment. 

Archie, returned from the same war as Jason, was excited for his friend’s marrying the richest, loveliest girl in town. Jughead mostly just nodded along and stared into space while he was embraced by the weary soldier.

Betty, ever accommodating, congratulated him as well. With reservations.

“Are you _sure_ you’re going to marry her, Jug?”

Jughead stared at her, still a bit in awe. Her pink lips were crushed together, concerned. Her blonde hair was loose, falling in wonderful ringlets around her shoulders.

“I think I am, actually.”

“Do you love her?”

That was an excellent question. Did he love her? What was love? Did his father love him? If the dynamic between himself and his father was love, if _that_ were the barest measures of love, than whatever fondness he felt for Cheryl was mad, epic love. If love meant something higher, than he didn’t know. They got along, in an abrasive way. They had similarly sharp tongues. They both enjoyed bleak books and tales of terror or mystery. Poe or Walpole or Maturin or Doyle.

But did he _love_ her?

What did it matter?

The presence or lack of love was rarely the deciding factor in a good match.

“Yeah,” he said.

Betty smiled. She reached across the rough wooden table and covered his hands with hers. For a moment, he felt that familiar, unsteady rocking in his stomach that Betty’s great green eyes had always triggered in him. He smiled back at her.

“If you both love each other,” said Betty. “I suppose that’s what’s important, right? Well, in the end, at least.”

“In the end,” Jughead echoed.

There was much bad blood between the Coopers and the Blossoms, dating to some obscure feud long before the Great Rebellion that few could quite recall. And many it seemed, did not want to. But Betty was not the sort to abide the strictures of petty ancestral rivalry.

So Forsythe ‘Jughead’ Jones were engaged to be married.

And now it was the 4th of July, his fiancée was out sailing with her brother, and he was here in Pop Tate’s eatery, trying like hell to compose a patriotic poem that was rote enough to please everyone and inspired enough to deflect accusations of cliche. Not that anyone would pay it that much mind.

Jughead looked out the far window, onto the rolling ocean. The waves were green, capped by foaming froth. He could smell the salt, and twinges of slime and seaweed. The breeze was hard, but temperate for the summer. A light fog hung over the town as it always did. But it was at its weakest towards the middle of the year. In the autumn it would become truly impenetrable.

This was not the worst place to live.

The door to Pop Tate’s eatery opened. Betty Cooper, wearing a simple white dress with loose skirts, stepped inside. Jughead lifted his eyes, put down his pen, and smiled.

“Hey, Juggie.”

“Look what the winds of time have blown in,” he said.

“That doesn’t even make any sense,” Betty said, teasing.

She slipped into the chair across from him.

“Going to the parade, later?” she asked.

“Presumably,” he said.

“And the poem? Not to be too demanding.”

“Just about…” He scribbled out a last line, less than satisfactory. It would have to do. “Done.”

Betty inclined her head. They sat in silence for a moment. Jughead had not seen her so much, lately. He did miss her. But it seemed ever since the engagement, they’d been together less than ever. There was a great, flat rock on Sweetwater Beach. Where they used to read poetry to each other, or simply share the mundanities of their daily existence.

He wondered if it was Mr. or Mrs. Cooper who, even as they purchased his vaunted literary skills for the paper, discouraged their daughter from spending much time around Cheryl Blosson’s betrothed.

It was almost certainly Mrs. Cooper. Though he hated the Blossoms as much as his wife, Hal Cooper had been seen very little in town in the past year or two. He was often away on long trips, and he was in town spent nearly all his time sequestered in his home. When he went out, it was brief and short and wrapped up in a long coat or even a cloak.

“Where’s Cheryl?” Betty asked, as if she had read him.

“Out sailing,” said Jughead. “With Jason.”

Betty was not surprised. Her face soured a bit. The Blossom twins’ intimacy was known to every denizen of Riverdale. Before Jughead came along, folks had joked often (when their backs were turned, of course), that the reason the twins had so little use for the opposite sex was because it would not be legal for them to marry each other.

But that was not entirely true, hence the sour expression on Betty’s face. Jason had enjoyed a short fling with Betty’s sister Polly soon after his return from Europe. It had ended quickly, leaving Polly broken and miserable and himself no worse for the wear. The affair had not endeared the Blossoms any further to the Coopers, or vice versa.

“Of course,” Betty said, finally. Pop shuffled up to take her order.

Then the door opened again.

Archie Andrews, tall and broad and red-haired, stumbled in, breathing hard.

“Fellas!”

“Slow down, Arch,” said Jughead.

“It’s Cheryl and Jason,” said Archie.

Jughead stood automatically. She _was_ his fiancée, after all.

“What about them?” Betty asked, standing after her friend.

By the time they got to the beach, the rest of the town was already there.

The wind blew in gales from the sea, and the gentle waves of the morning became roaring troughs smashing into the shore like mad bulls. The ocean hissed and boiled. The breeze stung the observers on the beach.

Jughead looked out to sea. He saw something bobbing in the waves a few hundred yards off from the beach. He squinted, shielding his eyes with his hand. It was beige, angular and hard. Man-made. Finally he recognized it. An up-turned vessel.

They reached the first ranks of the crowd.

“What happened?” was the first question Betty asked of Kevin Keller, for Archie had been too breathless to fill them in on the way. Kevin shook his head and pointed down the strand. Jughead turned his head.

Cheryl sat a few dozen feet away from the waves, wrapped in a towel, already soaked through. Both her parents stood by her side, hands on her shoulders. Constable Keller, in his black half-cape, knelt before her. Jason was conspicuously absent.

For a moment, she was a stranger again. Or close to a stranger as Riverdale got. She was not his fiancée, who he had come to like if not love. She was just the wealthy girl with the tyrant father from the house up on the hill.

But then it was gone. He rushed over, boots puffing up sand.

“What happened?” came the words from his mouth.

Cliff and Penelope stared at him, wordless.

Cheryl, in an off-red sundress, soaked to the bone. She dug her pale toes into the sand, still shivering. She looked up at him with her big eyes and shuddered: “Jason.”

Jughead looked out to the swamped boat and understood.

He lowered his head.

And then he looked up to the sand dunes. One man stood apart from the crowd. He had on a dark jacket, dark slacks stuffed into antiquated soldier’s boots. He had not shaved in a while, but did not yet have a beard. His mouth was in a deep frown, and he could not take his eyes from the sea.

Jughead watched his father for another moment, and turned to tend to Cheryl.

* * *

When she first clapped eyes on Riverdale, Massachusetts, Veronica Lodge’s initial thought was that she would not like to spend a week here, much less years to come.

To say Riverdale was not Manhattan was more a cruel joke than an understatement.

The town was built long, stretching along the coast in a crude ellipse. On its western edge, it was bounded by a river that ran up, turned sharply to the east, and emptied into the sea about twenty miles north of Riverdale. On the east was the deep Atlantic, roaring and foaming beneath a cool autumn wind when the Lodge’s sleek new Ford topped the hill and they caught their first sight of the ocean.

Riverdale itself was not much to look at. The houses were modest, white walls bleached by howling ocean winds and marine salt. Little windows with the shutters drawn tight. The main street was unpaved, the the automobile navigated only with difficulty.

The buildings were built at strange angles, hard and slanting. There had been no common plan to organize the construction, this was a settlement that had sprung up organically.

The people at least, seemed alright. They stared, sullen but not necessarily unwelcoming. They dressed simply, the women in straight dresses, the men in trousers and rolled up shirtsleeves.

As they moved into the south side of town, nearer the sea shore, the conditions of the houses deteriorated markedly. These were small, rickety shacks cobbled together from driftwood and whatever pine or maple could be hewn down in the hills inland. Veronica instinctively wrinkled her nose. There were less people on the streets here, and those that were looked miserably shabby, despondent. Tattered workmen’s clothes, mostly. The streets narrowed in this part of town, and garbage piled up along the house walls.

“This is where I grew up,” said Hermione Lodge, with hints of pride and shame.

“Indeed,” said Veronica.

Her first night there, Veronica stopped at a little eatery, a place she said was built decades ago, and if it was still run by old Tate, then it was the best food for miles around.

It was built of solid, wind-beaten pine, right up against the ocean, only a few dozen yards from the breakers. Inside was charming enough. Rough wooden tables, fickle candles on the walls. Not too many people inside, besides the proprietor, an elderly man in a forage cap who radiated fatherly charm, and a pair of youngsters.

A young man, handsome enough, redheaded. A very beautiful young blonde.

“Is the food here decent?” Veronica asked. She looked around. Through the windows. The sea was black beneath a rising moon. Tendrils of impenetrable fog reached out over the swirling water towards the shore. She could feel the deep mist in her flesh. The two stared at her staring “I’m sorry—“ Veronica half-laughed. “I don’t mean to be rude but…this town...I feel like I’m a misstep from stumbling into the Grimpen Mire.” She stared at them. The young gentleman did not seem to grasp the reference. The blonde smiled, so maybe she did.

Betty Cooper and Archie Andrews, as she would learn. And on meeting them, would learn also that perhaps Riverdale was not so bad as she had first dreaded.

It was a town built in layers, with undercurrents of charm beneath the outward face of dreary gloom, and beneath that charm further shadows lurking. Like any place on earth, Veronica supposed.

And she learned, she had arrived at perhaps the worst possible time: in the midst of a local tragedy.

Jason Blossom, son of the town’s first citizen Clifford, and lately a war hero, had drowned when his boat capsized, while pleasure boating with his sister. Just off-shore.

This had left all of Riverdale reeling, for her people were not used to such melancholy. But especially Cheryl Blossom, Jason’s devoted sister, who was by all accounts hardly tolerable in the best of times. She was barely sane now that she had lost the man she loved best.

Odd enough that her brother was that man, because she _was_ engaged. And as fortune would have it, Betty and Archie were friends of her fiancé, a poor and brooding if amicable fellow by the name of Forsythe, who for some inscrutable reason, preferred ‘Jughead’. Which meant Veronica got to know both the three pleasant youths, but also Cheryl, and Cheryl probably more than she would have liked.

“Oh,” Cheryl said, the first time they met, at the docks. She was wearing an elegant black mourning dress, _almost_ modest in its simplicity. But her face showed no stamp of that mourning. “More parvenus? And a _Lodge_ at that! Heretofore most of Riverdale’s thieves have been the sort to steal pennies rather than industries.”

Veronica ground her teeth. Yes, her father’s fortune may have been built largely on terrorizing competitors out of the steel market, engineering small-scale market crises, and defrauding Standard Oil that one time. But that didn’t make _her_ a thief.

“I’m sure it’s lovely to trace your line back to King Arthur or whomever, but I like having a family tree with _branches_.”

"Branch as it may. Thieves beget thieves, murderers beget murderers. And kings beget kings," Cheryl sniffed. "It's a matter of heredity.” 

And then they parted ways, though the exchange set the pattern of their many consequent duels.

But she found enough to like in Archie, Betty, and Jughead.

Betty in particular endeared herself immensely to Veronica. She was just the opposite of her urbane, wily, amoral high society entourage back home. Eminently sweet and caring, full of small town charm, though never to the point of foolishness or absolute naivete. Veronica felt like Betty was a salve for her own character flaws, those she wished to rectify. Perhaps here she could learn to be a bit more human.

She took to visiting Betty often at her parents' newspaper. As idle rich, Veronica didn’t have much to do besides in a little town like this.

So it was that chilly September evening.

Veronica stepped in through the _Register’_ s thin front door. It was hardly enough to keep out the mighty blasts of ocean wind. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get used to it. It had gotten cold in New York, but never so _forcefully_ cold. She drew a thin white shawl tighter around her head and shoulders. Shut the door tight behind her and enjoyed the slight rise in temperature.

Betty appeared out of the back room carrying an armful of the next morning’s papers. She flashed an adorable smile at the sight of her friend. Veronica waved coyly.

Alice Cooper came out behind her daughter and rolled her eyes. Veronica smiled uncomfortably. It was clear Alice, even if she was tolerant, did not care for much her. The prevailing concern seemed to be that this surely wild, unprincipled socialite would corrupt innocent, pastoral Betty Cooper.

Veronica had once overheard Alice giving her daughter a ranting warning about the dangers of the rushing, sparkling world beyond the hills and dales. She did not want, Alice said, her good daughter’s head contaminated with ‘drink, or nihilism, or socialism’.

There was also Polly, Betty’s sister of who very little was seen. When she emerged from her rooms in the rear of the house (which doubled as the _Register_ ’s printing station), she regarded everyone with a miserable, drawn look, before disappearing back into the private shadows. Some nasty business with now-dead Jason, according to Betty. A fling gone badly.

Finally, there was the enigmatic Harold ‘Hal' Cooper. Veronica had not seen him once in her months here. According to Alice, who got especially snippy when the subject of her husband was broached, he was a very busy man, and often away to Greendale or Boston on business. When he was home, the usual excuse for his absence was chronic illness.

It seemed odd to Veronica that a man so often sick should be rushing up and down the eastern seaboard with such regularity, but what did she know?

Tonight, Veronica sat with Betty as the latter searched the paper’s final editions for errors in the typeface or spelling. It was a small town, and so there was not much of magnitude to report. The _Register_ was still carrying stories on Jason’s death all these months later (less than flattering ones, considering the hoary Cooper-Blossom rivalry).

Veronica grew bored naturally.

“Are we going to do this all night?” Veronica asked, inspecting a small cut on the palm of her hand that had suddenly become very interesting.

“Until the work is _done_ , V,” Betty chided. “All in a day’s work,” she teased.

“Well,” Veronica stretched herself out over the table. “I don’t work much.”

A moment’s silence. Then Veronica spoke again: “So what exactly happened between your sister and uh…Jason?”

Betty sighed. She cleared another printing.

“It was just—Jason was kind of a rake, you know? He was always stringing girls along. Polly was one of the only ones he ever wanted anything more with” Betty’s pen grew a bit more brutal as she spoke, digging deep into the paper and leaving heavy tracks of ink behind. “But he still didn’t want much. Polly really thought they were in love, I guess. Cheryl was jealous, obviously. Maybe that’s why things ended. But anyways, it broke her heart.”

Veronica looked down at the table.

“Oh. Yeah. That’s a familiar story."

Betty shrugged and smiled sadly.

“I wouldn’t know.”

“And how about you?” Veronica teased. “Pretty as you are. Any young gentleman callers of your own?”

Betty spared her a glance, and a light shade of red colored and left her cheeks.

“Not that I know of.”

“Really?” Veronica bent forward over the table. “Not Archie?” A short silence. “Or Jughead?”

At the last name, Betty seized and dropped her pen. She quickly recovered her bearing, picked the pen back up, and went about her work again. Veronica beamed. “You _do_ fancy him!”

“Veronica, for God’s sakes!” She flushed harder this time, and frowned. “Maybe two or three years ago we had some interest in one another. But he’s _married_!”

“He’s not married _yet_ ,” Veronica said. When Betty’s face took on a horrified tint, she laughed. “I’m only _joking_!”

“You’re always treading lines,” Betty said.

“Fair enough. Look, when you’re done here, let’s get out. I know there’s nothing to do in this town, but let’s head down to the beach, at least!”

Betty agreed. And within twenty minutes, she’d finished sorting through the papers. So they stood and headed down to the beach, only a ten minute walk from the Cooper house. The rain had stopped, but the sand was still wet and soggy. Veronica stripped off her shoes at the edge of the dunes, and sighed as her toes sank amid the cool granules.

The moon sat pretty in the skies, half full and guiding a stream of silver light over the waves. She breathed in the salt. 

There was a long, low sandbar a few hundred yards beyond the beach, just barely visible now, at high tide.

“What’s the name of the reef again?” Veronica asked.

“Hangman’s Reef,” she said. “I know it's not very pretty, but sometimes people like to race each other out there, and back, swimming. They say ships used to crash on it a lot, back in the day. That was when Riverdale was a big port town. Not so much anymore.”

She turned to Betty, to say “do you folks go bathing a lot in the summer?” but she couldn’t get the words out, because suddenly Betty dropped to her knees in the sand, yowling in pain. She clutched her neck and whimpered. Veronica crouched down next to her. Betty whimpered and rubbed her throat.

“Oh my God! Are you okay?”

Betty scrambled to her feet, still massaging her neck.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’ve just had these…pains in my neck lately. I don’t know what it is. Just cramps, I suppose. It’s nothing serious.”

“ _Looked_ serious,” said Veronica.

“My father was always getting cramps, too,” Betty said. "I guess it's congenital." And Veronica decided to drop it.

They walked along the moonlit beach for a while, and conversation tended towards lighter topics. 

“You’ve _never_ been out of Riverdale?” asked Veronica, incredulous.

“Well, I guess technically I’ve been to Greendale and Centerville. But I’ve _definitely_ never been out of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Betty smiled sheepishly, almost like she was embarrassed.

“Well,” said Veronica, hooking her arm into her friend’s. “We have to rectify that immediately. As soon as it’s within my means, I promise I’ll take you to New York at the very least. And if possible, abroad. How’d you like to see Paris?”

“Is it as nice as all the books say?” Betty asked.

“Better, if you know the right people. And I definitely do. My father knows Poincaré, you know. Now, granted, it isn’t an entirely cordial relationship, but it exists.”

Betty starred out to the hazy sea, beneath its curtains of fog.

“Juggie wants to go to Moscow.”

Veronica’s eyes popped.

“Moscow?” She rushed a little ahead of her friend, sidling towards the water and dipping her toes in the lapping surf. “Does he have a death wish?”

“No. He just manages to maintain a worldview that's at the same time very pessimistic and wildly romantic." She picked up a flat stone and hurled it into the sea. "And a few months ago some German sailor taught him an impromptu course on Marxian economics down at the docks." 

Veronica scoffed.

“Well, I—“ She stopped dead. There was something in the water before her, washed up on the shore. For a moment, she took it for a piece of battered driftwood, bleached by the sun and softened by the sea. But that was only because her mind would not accept the reality of it.

Because it was a corpse.

Veronica screamed. She scrambled away from the body, tripped over an incoming wave, and splashed back into the surf. Her fine dress was thoroughly soaked. She hardly noticed, concerned only with removing herself from the situation.

Betty rushed up to her.

“Veronica, wh—oh my God!” Betty did not scream. She gasped, deep and heavy, and helped her friend to her feet.

The body was a young man’s, probably a little over six feet in height. He might have been handsome in life, but the rolling sea had taken its toll. Both his eyes were gone, plucked out by fish or scuttling crabs. In their place, a pair of dark pits glared viciously. His lips were split and swollen, beginning to rot, so that one could see the teeth clearly and a hint of the jawbone. His skin was a sickly greenish-white, flayed away in places by attrition or the attention of scavengers.

Worst of all was the mark in his brow. A neat, dark little perforation ringed by a patch of bruised flesh.

Veronica could only whimper incoherently. Betty touched her shoulders. “It’s Jason,” she said. “He was shot.”

Veronica heard her, but hardly. Because now she was staring out to sea. Because out there, just beyond the breakers, something was moving. Multiple things, actually. Veronica took them for a group of seals, at first. Their were about ten. Maybe fifteen. Their sleek, rounded heads shone wet under the moon. Their fins, or perhaps their feet, produced thin, sharp sheets of foam as they drove onwards. Their backs bowed and bent, undulating like serpents.

But they were not seals. She saw their hides reflect in the dim light as they drifted in and out of the fog. It was rough. Almost scaly. They moved with a strange, purposeful torpidity. Betty followed her gaze. She too saw the things.

The creatures, whatever they were, paused. And for a moment, Veronica swore they were being watched. But then the head of the pack turned out towards sea, and dipped below the crashing waves. The others followed suit, until the last in the train disappeared back into the depths.

A trail of ripples flashed over the surface, and then it was subsumed beneath a swirling crest of foam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much eldritch horror in this chapter, but we're getting there, I promise.


	2. dreams in Blossom Manor

Jughead Jones suffered from dreadful nightmares that cold September evening.

They were nightmares of the sort that only make the least bit of sense in the moment of their occurrence, and which upon waking are found to elude adequate expression. 

He stumbled through a black and silent city, greater than any metropolis conceivable or constructible by human effort. The walls and edifices were impossible. Their angles clashed rudely, settling into shapes and orders that should not have been. Slimy, leering green stone towered up all around, scraping a grey and lightless heaven devoid of stars. 

It was as if the whole city was constructed from one singular block of stone, only it was some manner of masonry with no parallel in any extant human civilization. It was too intricate and fine, the indecipherable script scrawled along the parapets of temples and palaces. And Jughead felt that even could he comprehend them, he would desire nothing less.

But as careful and particular as was the stonework, so was it too grand and too ponderous for human effort. The whole city rang with black echoes, every alleyway and every broad thoroughfare constructed to perfectly carry these blasts of infernal sound.

He was alone in the city. Grand as it was, his footfalls were the only disruption of the perfect, hadal silence. 

And something stalked him through the city. Something he could understand only in brief hints and flashes. Lumbering greenish-black ooze, tipped with wicked claws and a million watery golden eyes. 

The shadow fell over the eerie monoliths and spires. Fell over him.

He turned a corner. And saw someone else. A man as himself, back turned to him, head down. Jughead tried to call out. He could not. The man turned anyways. 

The monstrous _thing_ stalking him drew nearer, earth shaking with its pace.

The man’s eyes met him. It was Jason Blossom, restored to life and to perfect health. Jughead drew a breath. Jason smiled.

And then the thing was upon them. 

Jughead jolted awake with a shout, something he’d not thought possible outside of dime novels. It was an incalculable relief to feel the comfort of a warm, leather armchair beneath him. Hear the fireplace crackling some ten feet away. He grasped his shirt, to make sure he was indeed awake.

He was in the sitting room of Thornhill Manor. And normally, Thornhill Manor, that old colonial mansion with its stony face, its sepulchral corridors, and its myriad ghosts, was not the sort of place one was relieved to find himself in. But as against the cyclopean wasteland of his dream, this was a patch of heaven on the earth.

At the very least, Thornhill did not make a point of defying Euclidian geometry. 

Cheryl sat across from him, bare feet drawn up onto the chair under her. She stared at him over the edge of her book.

“Good God,” she said. “What is the matter with you?”

“Thank you, Cheryl,” he said, dryly. “Not ‘my dear, what’s troubling you?’ or ‘oh, are you quite alright, my love?’ No, it’s ‘what is the matter with you?’. I can see we’re in for decades of marital bliss.” He picked up his own book, fallen into his lap. _Insurgent Mexico_ , by John Reed. “But since you’re so concerned, it was a nightmare.” 

The dim firelight played on the angles and the fullness of Cheryl’s face, and she looked uncommonly beautiful. Maybe he _did_ love her. 

“Well, I’m _living_ one,” she said curtly. 

Only two months since Jason’s death, which had driven them to postpone the wedding indefinitely. Jughead could not say he was disappointed, never much the type to stand on ceremony. He would have been fine with a civil service and a judge’s confirmation himself. 

It also seemed to have postponed the rest of Cheryl’s life indefinitely. It was difficult to overstate just how dearly she loved her brother. Not in the past tense, mind you. She loved him still, and would until the salt of the sea wore his bones to dust, and even then. 

He’d always remember the day Jason came home from Europe, and the way Cheryl had flung her arms around him with the sort of sheer adoration in her eyes she’d never held for him, or anyone else for that matter.

He had felt less than worthwhile on that day. When Jason and Archie departed to list in the US Army, he’d tried to do the same. He’d not wanted to go to war, of course, as he had nothing against the Germans (or the Austrians, or Hungarians, or Turks for that matter). But it was the thing to do. 

The doctors had not agreed. Or at least, they had not thought it was the thing _he_ ought to do. Unfit for service, due mostly to childhood illnesses that had long since left him. He was relieved, and guilty for his relief.

And when Jason had come home, he had been all too happy to insinuate that Jughead was not near the man he was, since he had proven unable to kill other men. If their respective apportionment of Cheryl’s fawning attention was any indication, she’d agreed. 

Jughead was sure if she was given the choice to trade her fiancé’s life for her brother’s, she’d chuck him into the sea before he could raise any protest. That didn’t bother him too much, truth be told. Everyone had her price.

He read the title of Cheryl’s book. 

“Stoddard, again?” Jughead asked.

“Indeed,” she said.

“And what’s today’s threat to Nordic civilization?”

“Well, it’s Mr. Stoddard’s position that the current globally predominant position of the white races is imperiled by the virility and proliferation of alien peoples. Should the European and European- _derived_ nations of the world not take care, we shall be...inundated by foreign armies, and all Nordic civilization, as you’ve said, will come to great grief.” 

“Terrifying,” Jughead replied blandly. “I suppose it's about that hour. It’s been some time since your last Madison Grant tirade.” 

“Oh, don’t be so sensitive,” she said.

“I just wouldn’t want to contaminate your proud, stout Anglo-Saxon bloodline with my inferior Alpine germ plasm,” he rolled his eyes and reopened _Insurgent Mexico_. 

Then the phone rang (it was one of the few in town and had a direct line to Keller’s house which doubled as a police station). Clifford and Penelope were already firmly tucked away in bed. Which meant he had to get up and answer, because Cheryl most assuredly was not going to do so. 

And so he did. She watched him go, satisfied.

“Hello?”

“It’s Constable Keller.” 

Cheryl, who had truly magnificent hearing, perked up.

“Constable Keller?”

“What’s the matter?” Jughead asked.

“Is Clifford home?” 

“He’s asleep.”

“Well, I’m very sorry to have to deliver this news.”

Oh, of course he was.

* * *

So this was the second time in a matter of months that a crowd found itself at Sweetwater Beach, in the interest of Jason Blossom. It was not nearly as large as the crowd of July 4th, for it was late in the evening, and even a murder could not draw most of the weary fishermen from their beds. But there were a handful of spectators, along with Riverdale’s one lawman, those who had discovered the body, the Blossoms, and of course, Jughead himself.

There was his body drawn up on the gleaming white sand, savaged by the beasts of the sea and by the ocean herself. And Jughead’s first thought was that he looked remarkably fresh for a corpse that had been two months in the water. Impossibly so, as a matter of fact. 

Cheryl stood aside, sniffling quietly, and alternatively staring in raw horror at her brother’s remains, and clapping eyes firmly onto her feet. 

Clifford Blossom loomed over Jason’s body, examining the bullet hole in his forehead.

“Someone murdered my boy,” the man said, gruffly. Then louder, with more bluster. “Someone murdered my boy!” 

Constable Keller stood aside, scribbling something in a notepad. His cape fluttered around his shoulders. 

“I’m sorry, Cliff,” Jughead muttered, as he stared down into Jason’s rotted face. “Penelope.” 

Clifford nodded. 

“Whoever did this. They’ll pay. I promise that.” 

Betty and Veronica huddled away from the water. They were the ones who had discovered the corpse, by accounts. Betty had her arm around the shoulders of her still-shivering friend. Archie stood by them, watching the sea impassively. 

Jughead decided the decent thing to do was comfort his fiancée. So he wrapped her up in a hug, and she sniffled into his chest. 

And then the town of Riverdale was confronted with a new problem. The question of who had murdered Jason Blossom. 

Cheryl stuck by her story; that the sailboat had capsized, and she had lost sight of her brother in the churning water, and seen no more of him. 

Of course, that seemed somewhat doubtful now. 

And soon enough, Constable Keller came to Thornhill to make his inquiries.

“My daughter is not well enough to be put to the question, Constable,” said Penelope, curtly. 

“Forgive me, Mrs. Blossom. I only wish to ask—“

“It’s alright, mother,” Cheryl called from the drawing room. “I’ll speak with the constable.”

“If you disturb or upset her, I will see you thrown out of this house, lawman or no.” 

“Understood.” 

Jughead watched from the drawing room, a hand on the backrest of Cheryl’s chair. 

Keller entered and sat across from her. He removed his custodian’s hat and placed it in his lap. His little cape drooped round his shoulders. 

“How are you bearing up, Miss Blossom?” 

“Well, I just watched my brother’s pitiful corpse plucked out of the sea, a bullet in his skull. How do you imagine, constable?” 

Keller flinched. 

“Mr. Jones, if you could…leave us?” 

“Mr. Jones will stay,” he said, coldly. He’d never been fond of the law, which in Riverdale meant Constable Keller. 

The law had only ever been a snare to him. FP was not a good father, but he was even less use to his young son rotting in a gaol cell for some silly infraction. Likewise, Jughead had more than once been run out of an alley or a field as a trespasser, when searching only for a sympathetic spot to lay his head.

“It’s okay, Jughead,” said Cheryl, who usually called him ‘Forsythe’. “It’s fine.”

Jughead acceded and stepped just outside of the room. Listening in. 

Keller made pleasant small talk at first, but when he realized Cheryl was not buying it launched straight into a dissection of her story and less than subtle intimations of potential guilt.

“You told us that you and Jason unmoored at about 6:00 in the morning on July 4th. That you sailed up and down ten miles worth of coast for five hours, before the waters turned rough, and the boat capsized, and he drowned. Now, we find him washed up on the beach, a bullet in his head.” Cheryl was silent. Keller leaned towards her. “So what else is a lie?” 

“Nothing is a lie,” Cheryl hissed. “I stand by my story because it’s true, no matter what desperate lawmen should wish to imply.”

“Desperate?”

“If you need a scapegoat for my brother’s _murder_ , you won’t find her in me.” 

“So are you asking me to believe that the boat capsized, you lost sight of your brother, and someone shot him in the water?” 

“Maybe,” Cheryl said. “Or maybe he managed to swim to shore, and his assassin found him there. I wouldn’t know, as I am _not_ that assassin!” 

“You understand how this is all difficult to believe,” said Keller. 

“I understand that instead of doing your best to find the guilty party, you’d rather abuse my family’s sacred hospitality, and harass me in my time of grief!”

Her voice broke on the last syllable.

Jughead felt a flash of sadness, and a rush of protectiveness. Something he rarely felt, and even more rarely towards his bride-to-be. But he felt it now. And almost as strong was a sense of sheer annoyance at what seemed to him utter absurdity. That Keller could suggest, even hypothetically, that Cheryl would ever inconvenience Jason, much less murder him, was insanity at its peak. She'd sooner cut her own throat with a blacksmith’s rasp. It did indeed seem like he was trying to make culprits rather than hunt them. 

“What do you know about your brother’s relationship to Polly Cooper?” Keller asked. “I know the two of them were consorting with one another for a while.”

“And?” 

“Well, you never much liked Polly, did you? Perhaps—“

"Perhaps,” Jughead interrupted, stepping back into the room. “You’re upsetting Cheryl. And as the lady of the house made clear, that’s grounds for your removal.” 

“Jughead, with all due respect, this isn’t your house,” Keller said. 

“I think I’m due enough respect for you to call me Mr. Jones, if you please,” said Jughead, firm and hard. “I’m not a child. And we aren’t friends.”

Keller set his jaw. 

He stood, and extended his hand to shake Jughead’s. 

“Shake hers,” he said.

Keller’s brows dropped but he nonetheless shook Cheryl’s dainty hand. He placed his helmet back onto his head.

“Mr. Jones,” he said. “Miss Blossom.” He inclined his head, and left again. 

Cheryl looked up at Jughead. Her eyes softer than he’d ever seen them.

“You don’t think I had anything to do with Jason’s death, do you?”

Jughead scoffed. 

“I can’t even imagine,” he said, and it was the truth. She smiled at him, and perhaps it was lingering distaste for Keller and the law, or perhaps it was the miserable, dark sincerity in her big eyes that made him say what he said next. “Cheryl, I promise, I’ll do anything and everything in my admittedly meager power to discover Jason’s killer. It’s absolute nonsense that Keller would even entertain the thought of your responsibility.” She smiled wider. She stood from her chair, willowy and paler than usual. She embraced him.

“Thank you, Jughead.” 

Then she kissed him full on the lips, something they did only very rarely. It was not unpleasant, though there was no great passion. The kiss was broken. 

On the way out of Thornhill, he was waylaid by Clifford. Clifford had never fully acclimated to entertaining regularly and often the son of an indigent Welsh sailor in his stately mansion. Much less acclimated to the prospect of such a one as future son-in-law. He regarded Jughead with an old-world aristocratic propriety that demanded he treat his social inferiors with a polite indulgence. But that did not mean he had to _adore_ them. 

“I heard what you said to Cheryl,” Clifford said, putting a heavy hand on Jughead’s shoulder. “A noble sentiment but…you’re no detective, son. Maybe best to leave this to the authorities. We wouldn’t want to worsen the situation, any.” 

“I don’t think I could worsen the situation, any, sir.” 

“Maybe not,” Clifford conceded. 

Jughead threw on his coat and headed down the ponderous stone steps at Thornhill’s gate. Then Clifford called after him: “how’s your father?”

Jughead froze. He was not sure if it was an attempt to needle at him, or something else. It certainly was not genuine concern. He turned.

“He survives, as usual.”

“Give him my best.” 

Jughead nodded.

* * *

Veronica half-believed Riverdale was glad Jason Blossom had been dragged out of the Atlantic with a bullet in his skull. For this town was a place of such irrelevance, Jason’s initial ‘drowning’ would have had to provide enough grist for the rumor mills to last years. But now that he’d been revealed for a murder victim; surely idle talk could subsist on him for decades?

Otherwise, it would be back to gossiping that Mrs. Davenport was overcharging on her wares or that Mr. Billings was stepping out on his wife. 

But in the misty, dewy streets of Riverdale, folks talked only and often of Jason Blossom. Rather than a stark refusal to believe anyone in town capable of such monstrosity, the people in their ramshackle, wind-swept houses were remarkably eager to lay blame at one another’s feet.

In the general store, Veronica heard two young woman foot their theory that the little-seen Hal Cooper had murdered Jason Blossom in a fit of rage over the boy’s seduction and subsequent abandonment of his daughter. 

At the docks, watching the men come in with the day’s catch, she heard two burly fisherman streaked with salty slime opine that likely, it had been Polly Cooper herself. Killed Jason perhaps in a fit of pique after he’d ended their liaisons. 

But more common than either of the above was the suggestion that Cheryl herself had slain her brother. Why? There were myriad theories to answer that. Some said she resented his position as heir apparent, and wished the family’s considerable fortune for herself. Others whispered, behind banks of fog and when no Blossom was in sight, that she loved her brother much more than she should have. And had been unbearably jealous of the Cooper girl. 

The Veronica who dwelt midst the concrete monoliths of Manhattan Island would have passed judgment of her own. This Veronica had no such desire. 

That would probably be the case even if she hadn’t been the one to stumble upon Jason’s poor corpse. But she had been. And it was not something she could quickly forget. 

She was far more shaken than was Betty. Betty had seen dead bodies before, she said. It was grim, but it would not keep her awake at night.

As for Veronica, she hoped that at least one day she would stop smelling the cruel odor of marine salt blended with the sharp rot of decayed flesh. No day soon, at least. 

The only thing that had affected them to what seemed equal extent was their quick sighting of those _things_ in the water, a moment after stumbling on Jason’s corpse. The grim figures slithering through the choppy sea, gleaming and thrashing under the moon. They’d incited a cold, primal dread in the girls. And they’d spoken of it little more, except to assure each other what neither believed: that it was nothing, just some school of odd fish or seals. 

Now they sat together the front room of the _Riverdale Register,_ as they often did these days. Even more than before the discovery of the corpse, for there was some comfort to be gained from the company of one that had shared such a horror with you. Lately though, Veronica had taken to actually helping rather than lazing about. It helped occupy her mind. 

Today she was simply reading off disjointed notes on the week’s events that Betty would translate into a neat, ordered template for the paper, which Alice Cooper would in turn put into proper print. 

“Marcus Mason—that’s Marmaduke’s father, I assume?—broke his leg falling off of a ladder. Wow.” 

Betty nodded. 

“Yep.” Then she scribbled it down. 

Veronica moved on to the next item. Just focus on this. On the paper. No murders. No deaths.

Then the door to the register swung open. Jughead Jones stepped in. He took off his hat and hung it on the rack.

“Hey, ladies,” he said.

Betty beamed, bright face lighting up further. “Jug! Hey!” Her green eyes widened, and she jumped forward to embrace her friend. She was always so _excited_ to see him, Veronica suspected whatever infatuation she’d harbored in the past was not entirely suppressed.

Jughead hugged her, and patted her back. 

“Thank God you’re here,” Veronica jested. “We were in the midst of a riveting debate on the adequacy of imperialism as a stop-gap measure to forestall the inevitable doom of capitalism, a debate that only you could resolve.”

“It’s good to see you, too, Veronica,” Jughead said.

“Sit down, Jug,” said Betty. “I’ll make us all some tea. And—“

“Actually,” Jughead touched his friend’s arm. “I—I’m here on business. More or less.”

Betty’s lovely face fell a little, and Veronica felt a twinge of hurt on her behalf. 

“Oh?” said Betty, composing herself quick.

“I was hoping I could talk to Polly. About…well…you know.” 

Betty’s face colored with emotion that Veronica could not well place. And she could _always_ place emotion. “Jughead, you know she doesn’t like visitors. Not lately.” 

“I know,” Jughead said. “It’s just that Keller came by Thornhill earlier. And the way he talked to Cheryl—it’s like he thinks _she_ killed Jason.” Betty’s face told she was not entirely sure that was untrue. But if Jughead noticed, he ignored it. “And I just wanted to try to get as clear a picture of all of this as I can. Myself.”

“You want to solve Jason’s murder?” Betty asked, suddenly eager. Veronica smiled. Her new friend did have something of an affinity for mystery and its resolution. A regular lady Dupin. 

“Well, if you wish to be blunt,” said Jughead. He peered over Betty’s shoulder. “Your mother’s not home, is she?” 

“No,” Betty said.

“Come on, then. It’ll only take us a minute.”

Betty sighed.

“Alright. Come on back. Let’s see.”

“Thank you.” Jughead removed his coat, and then he and Veronica followed Betty into the rear rooms of the house. 

“As long as we’re tactful, respectful, I’m sure everything will be hunky dory,” Veronica said. 

Jughead reached for the first door in the rear hallway.

“No!” Betty exclaimed, loudly.

Jughead yanked his hand away like from a toxic plant.

“What?” Veronica asked.

“That’s my father’s room,” said Betty, downplaying her moment’s excitement. “He’s resting.” 

From within, there was a rough, violent cough. Hollow and wet. Something shifted. 

“O-kay,” Veronica accepted.

Betty took them to the next room in the hall. She knocked, lightly.

“Polly? Pol? It’s me, Betty.” 

There was a long interval, and then the weak, pitiable voice from the other side of the door. “What is it?”

“It’s Jughead,” said Betty in her softest voice, like she was speaking to a horse. “He wants to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to _anyone_!” Polly insisted. 

“Please?” said Betty in that sweetly plaintive voice that failed to charm very few. “About Jason.” Another pause. “He just wants to help.”

Jughead stood against the door and said: “I’ll be brief, Polly. I promise.”

Given a minute, Jughead looked ready to surrender the whole endeavor. But then the door swept open.

Polly Cooper stood before them, in poor condition. Her skin, bereft of the sun, had turned the color of weak, light cream. Her hair hung over her shoulders and chest in wild, unwashed tangles. Blue eyes watery and sad. 

But all of this could be easily ignored, because far more prominent was the fact that she was unmistakably pregnant.

About four months so, if Veronica had to guess. 

Jughead stared at her belly for a moment, and then realizing the faux pas, tore his eyes away. Too late.

“Oh,” said Polly. “They didn’t _tell_ you?” 

“Uh…no,” said Jughead, awkwardly. “They didn’t.” 

“God forbid Alice Cooper bear the shame,” Polly scoffed.

“Is it—“ Jughead began to say.

“Jason’s? Yes.” Polly’s eyes filled up with tears. 

Jughead nodded. He lowered his head, as if he were afraid to look her in the face, and perhaps he was. 

Polly, with some coaxing, came out into the front room and sat down with a cup of tea. 

“How long were you and Jason involved with each other?” Jughead asked.

“I met him— _met_ him—in spring. Maybe it was the first week of April,” said Polly, her voice distant and wistful. She repeated ‘met him’, for in Riverdale there was no ‘meeting’ anyone, unless they were new to town. Every person in this town knew every other. So when she said she had ‘met’ him, Veronica thought, it must mean she had spoken to him, seen him as a man for the first time, rather than as the far and icy son of Clifford Blossom. “We got to talking and—“ she sniffled. “It happened quick! People say it was a fling. It _wasn’t_ a fling. We loved each other. We did.” 

Jughead nodded along, encouraging her story. Betty rubbed her sister’s shoulder as she spoke. 

“His parents…Clifford and Penelope,” Polly spoke eager to get the names from her lips. “They hated me. Hated _us_. This…stupid, poisonous rivalry. And I knew mother and father would have hated him as much. So I said nothing at first.” More tears, and Betty helped her wipe them clean. 

“When did you find out you were pregnant?” Jughead asked, leaning forward and tenting his fingers, looking every bit the shrewd detective. 

“About two months ago,” said Polly. “Only a week before—“ she could not finish. Then she turned, so that the next words were addressed to her sister: “he was so happy, Betty. So happy when he found out. He said he would marry me. That we’d raise our baby together.” She dissolved into more sniffling.

Jughead and Betty shared a short look. 

“You were engaged?” asked Betty. 

“Well, not quite yet,” Polly said. 

“Polly,” asked Jughead, moving closer. “Who do you think killed Jason?”

Polly scoffed, her red-rimmed eyes sharpening. 

“Who do I think killed him? You should go ask at Thornhill,” she spit.

Veronica raised her eyebrows. She felt this was not her investigation, nonetheless she couldn’t help but interject.

“You think the Blossoms killed him?” 

Jughead grimaced, since that was the very thesis he had come hoping to discredit. 

“I told you,” said Polly. “They hated me. Hated the fact we loved each other. I don’t have any proof. But why not?” More tears. “Who else?” 

“With all due respect,” Jughead said. “If they were so unhappy with the match, wouldn’t it have made more sense to kill you than their beloved son and heir apparent?” 

“I don’t know!” Polly exclaimed, distressed. Betty rubbed her back and fixed Jughead with a tempering stare. 

“Okay,” he said. “Is there anything else? I mean to say, any other enemies Jason had. Anyone who might—“

“I don’t know,” Polly repeated. “Talk to Mr. and Mrs. Blossom. They hated us,” she said one more time. More sniffling. “They did.” 

Veronica caught Jughead’s eye, wishing to suggest there was little more he’d get out of Polly.

Jughead nodded. 

“If that’s all. Thank you.” 

Polly regarded them with those big, watery blue eyes. She retreated back into the safety of her darkened bedroom. Betty watched her go, face drawn and damaged.

Jughead stood again, and replaced his hat. Betty watched him rise, her eyes telling she was not keen to see him go so quickly. 

Veronica wondered if she should say it now. She and Betty had discussed it some, since _that_ night. She had not told Sheriff Keller, because they had convinced themselves it was nothing. She did not want to sound like some hysterical city girl. But Betty had seen it too. Maybe she could tell Jughead. 

“Betty and I saw something,” Veronica blurted out. Jughead stopped, already turning towards the door. He wheeled around. 

“Saw what?” 

“That night. When we found…Jason. We saw something, in the water.” 

Jughead bent over the table, looked her in the eye like he was interrogating her. Veronica rolled her eyes.

“You mean besides Jason Blossom’s corpse?” 

“Yes.”

“Well? Don’t hold me in suspension.” 

“We saw these…shapes,” Veronica said, trying her best to sound reasonable and believable. “Dark shapes, moving in the water. Like animals of some kind, maybe. A whole school of them.” 

“Pod of seals,” said Jughead, the interest fleeing from his face. “Probably.”

“They weren’t seals, Jughead,” said Betty. His eyes recovered the curious glint. Obviously Veronica, who had grown up amidst Manhattan’s sharp planes of concrete and glass, knew little of the country and less of the sea, and he was not inclined to give her estimation of shadows in the water much credence. But Betty had grown up here, right along with him. They saw seals often, frolicking in the surf off of the docks or sunning themselves on the shore. She’d know one if she saw one.

“So what were they?” Jughead asked. 

“I don’t know,” said Betty. “They were odd-looking. They were too scaly to be seals. And they moved…oddly. I can’t really describe it.”

Jughead nodded.

“Well, I’ll keep it in mind.” Then to Betty. “I’m sorry to bother your sister. I just want to sort this out, like everyone else.” And he quickly appended: “for Cheryl’s sake.”

As soon as he’d said that, Betty doubled over, grasping her stomach in pain. 

“Hey!” Jughead exclaimed. “Betty! What’s wrong?” 

Veronica leapt up and ran to her friend, only just keeping her from toppling over with one arm. 

Betty gasped and moaned, and managed to right herself again, trembling. Jughead put a tender hand on the small of her back. 

“What’s wrong?” Jughead repeated.

“Nothing,” she said weakly, voice shaking.

“It didn’t _look_ like nothing,” Veronica said.

“ _Nothing_ ,” Betty insisted. “Just a cramp. That’s all.” 

Jughead watched her for a while, and decided in the end to accept the excuse. He hugged her. She reached up and kissed him softly on the cheek. He leaned into it, and embraced Betty again.

And then he left. Betty watched him go.

“Is he really going to keep it in mind?” Veronica asked.

“If he says he’ll keep something in mind, he will,” Betty answered, almost forcefully. 

Betty’s demeanor had changed some in the few minutes since she brought up the things in the water. Before even the cramp. Whereas she had been calm and easy enough through the day, now she looked to be irritated, or even frightened. She rubbed her stomach. 

“V, I had…nightmares last night.”

Veronica wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“With the state of this town, it’s no surprise.” 

“No this was…different,” Betty said. “It was about those things. In the water.”

“What about them?” Yet Veronica already suffered her own bout of chills. Something about the shapes was sincerely and truly unnerving. She felt as if she had seen something more than a school of odd fish. Something truly _wrong_.

“I can’t really explain it. It was like I was in this strange city. Slimy. Under the water. And the _things_ were everywhere.” Betty rubbed her arms. 

Veronica had not had the same dream. But the words still worked cords of dread up her spine. 

“Pleasant,” she said, dryly.

“And I was thinking…what if does have something to do with Jason’s murder?” 

Veronica cocked her head. She’d had the same fleeting thought. But it wasn’t a thought that made any sense, so she’d put it aside. 

“How…would that be?” she questioned. “I mean, unless you think fish can operate firearms.”

“Right, but what if they weren’t fish?”

“Well, they certainly weren’t _people_ ,” said Veronica. 

“I swear,” Betty said. “I thought I saw that some of them had _hands_.” 

Veronica did not much like that. 

“Should we tell Constable Keller we saw a band of men masquerading as fish out for a midnight swim?” 

“Maybe we don’t tell Keller anything,” said Betty, averting her eyes. “But maybe we _do_ try to investigate something ourselves.”

* * *

Jughead left the Cooper house in some low spirits. 

His interrogation of Polly yielded nothing except her probably grief-induced suspicion that Jason’s own parents were responsible for his death. It was a theory he found highly unlikely. Not because Penelope and Clifford were warm and indulgent guardians who doted on their children but because blue-blooded clans like the Blossoms valued nothing more than heredity and legacy. They would never sabotage the sacred bloodline with the murder of their only son. 

Probably. But what if—

But, no. They would not execute Jason because he’d enjoyed a bit of fun with a daughter of the petit bourgeoisie. After all, they were letting Cheryl marry _him_ (if reluctantly), a goddamned wharf rat. 

Polly. Betty.

She’d been so glad to see him, he nearly felt guilty. He’d seen less of her and of Archie since his and Cheryl’s engagement. Jughead did not fear he would be drawn into the orbit of the propertied classes and burst all tethers that bound him to the lower orders. That could not be. He had simply been born too humbly for that. It was too far a distance to travel. But perhaps he could be drawn far enough away that he would forget his first friends. 

_His old friends_.

He’d harbored quite a passion for Elizabeth Cooper, with her lovely disposition and boundless curiosity and great Atlantic eyes. For a long time, he had. But that was over, surely. He was to be married. To a lovely young woman with gold to keep him and ten generations of his children comfortable. 

When Betty had kissed him at the Register, his heart set itself to a warm and soothing beat that he seldom felt anymore. And he’d seen something in her eyes he only wished to hint at. 

But he would not think too much on that. He was a married man, or would be, soon enough. 

His chest throbbed and burned with more than exhaustion as he stole along the cold and dripping streets of Riverdale. 

The night’s temperature plummeted. The rolling fog drifted in over the docks and seeped into Riverdale proper. So thick he could hardly see. It soaked through Jughead’s heavy greatcoat as much as if it had rained. His footsteps sounded lonely and distant on the unpaved streets and driftwood sidewalks. 

He would stay at Thornhill tonight, Jughead decided. That was one of the better perks of his impending marriage. A regular place to stay the night. Sometimes the price was a day or two of evil stares from Penelope Blossom, but it was a small price, indeed. Thornhill, despite its fearsome reputation, had warm beds, and a fire, and even food. That was more than he’d ever known through his boyhood. 

Jughead looped through the south side of town, with its crooked shanty houses and slimy docks reeking of codfish. He passed the bleak, black little hovels shuttered tight. Angled chimneys sprouted out of the rough grey tiles and threw heady smoke into the thin midnight mist. 

The world of his youth. 

There were not many out so late, save a few evening fishermen at the docks, and youngsters here and there reclining in the shadows between houses. Riverdale still relied on gas lamps, and there were precious few even of those.

Jughead listened to the cruel Atlantic lick away at the shore. 

He passed the boathouse, grimy and dark under the futile moon. The dories and the fishermen’s boats rocked gently against their moorings. 

And then he cried out as a cold, grasping hand dug into his shoulder.

“Boy!” hissed the worn, guttural voice.

Jughead screamed. He spun round and shoved the stranger away. Then he collected himself, and grabbed his assailant by the collar. The man easily broke his grip and backed off, face concealed in the shade of the boathouse and the eddies of fog. Jughead brought up his fists and prepared for a fight. He was no champion brawler, but he had been in his share of scraps growing up in this dank little hell.

But the figure did not lurch back out of the mist at him. It stood, and then it threw its head back and howled with laughter.

Jughead’s terror broke and surrendered to raw rage.

FP stepped into the light of a gas lamp, laughing, stinking of whiskey.

“Still scared of your old man, eh?”

“What the hell is the matter with you?” Jughead hissed. He still had half a mind to sock his father in the jaw. 

“I didn’t have a choice. Couldn’t help myself,” FP said, still chuckling. “You gotta forgive me.”

Jughead sneered. He spit at his father’s feet.

“No, I don’t.” 

Then he turned and continued his walk.

“Wait!” FP called. Jughead stalled. He ground his teeth.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “Money? Because I don’t have any. And even if I did…”

FP stared at him through a wavering sheet of mist. His blue eyes faded red, and a heavy coat of stubble crept over his chin up to his jaw. His hair was wet, stringy, clinging to his temples. He was unsteady on his feet, and all he missed was a bottle clutched firmly in his hand to complete the picture of a pitiful drunk. 

Jughead’s stomach turned. Because he imagined if the years and the alcohol were accounted for, he might look very much like the man before him. And the idea filled him with mortal terror. 

“I don’t want any money,” said FP. “Not from you, anyways.” Jughead gave him a sheer moment to make clear what he _did_ want. “You still marrying the Blossom girl, eh?”

Jughead suffered a flush of indignation. Whatever misgivings he might have about the arrangement now and again, if it was to his father’s dissatisfaction, then he had not a single qualm about marrying Cheryl Blossom.

“Yes,” he said. “I fully intend to. And I don’t intend that you should have any say in the matter.” 

FP shook his head, less disappointed than sad.

“You know…she’s real pretty. Just like her mother was. But if I didn’t tell you—“

“I don’t care what you want to tell me,” Jughead said. “I don’t. Maybe I’d care if you’d ever told me anything worth a damn. But you didn’t. So save your protests.” 

“They found Jason’s body,” FP said. His lips were cracked, strung together by drying saliva clear each time he opened his mouth. FP broke his sentences up by short, furtive glances out to sea. As if he expected to see a U-Boat rising from the depths. Jughead watched, patience ebbing quick. “They found it right out by Hangman’s Reef, didn’t they?” 

Jughead swallowed. Hangman’s Reef. The place was infested with ghosts, to hear the whispering stevedores and the fishermen tell it. At the battle of Riverdale in 1813, the British Captain Harlton was supposed to have erected a gibbet out on the sandbar, and hanged captured militiamen in full view of the seaside village. The ghosts of those unfortunates were said to drift over the waters to this day. A number of drownings, shipwrecks, and even one shark attack lent the place an air of spectral dread. But those were only stories.

“More ghost stories?” Jughead snorted. 

“That family’s cursed, Jug,” said FP. “All of them. Believe me when I tell you.” 

“No, FP,” said Jughead. “ _This_ family,” he gestured to himself and then his father. “This family, to the extent it even exists, is cursed.”

And then he turned and continued on his way to Thornhill. The footsteps rang and told that his father was not following. 

Jughead was plunged into a grey mood that lasted to the gates of the rambling old mansion. 

If Hangman’s Reef was Riverdale’s premier haunt, Thornhill ranked as a close competitor. 

The mansion’s first incarnation had gone up by the hand of Henry Blossom, a dour puritan, more than two hundred years ago. It had burned down in the early 18th century, and the replacement colonial manor provided the framework for the towering mountain that existed now. It was now a cobbled fusion of a dozen era’s worth of stone and wood, the republican simplicity of the years just after the revolution, the ostentatious amendments of the Antebellum Era, and more recently the shining expansions of the breezy 90s. 

But no matter how it was augmented, the house always regressed towards the conditions of its environment, and those conditions were wet, cold, and dreary. So flashing marble became cracked and washed grey and fresh pine wood turned black and rotting under the unremitting lash of wind and sea. 

No better synecdoche for the crude and everlasting decay that was Riverdale itself.

Still, the mansion, if not lovely, was mighty. A stolid shadow under the moon that seemed as if it yearned to crush the whole world under its weighty foundations. 

Jughead let himself in, for Cheryl had gifted him a key, over the grumblings of her envious brother. 

The inside of the grand house was better kept than without. The stiff oak panelings on the walls were polished, so were the brass candelabras and the chandelier, the velvet or bearskin rugs fastidiously kept free of debris. 

It was impressive, considering that for such a massive estate, the Blossoms maintained no permanent servants, and only bi-weekly hired some lucky townsman or woman to come and tidy up for them. 

A few lights, gas or ancient candle, still gave their uncertain and fickle light. Jughead climbed the staircase, shadow long and bent up to the landing. A mounted wolf’s head glared down at him from the wall. 

He tracked through the hallway. The half-cracked doors to the aged library beckoned inside. 

“Jones.”

He gasped and nearly toppled forward with fright. Twisting round he sighted Grandmother Blossom sitting just within the threshold of the library, an opened tome in her lap. She was just as still, just as elegant and arcane as the decayed books lining each shelf. 

Rose Blossom was ancient, born only a scant few years after the last war with the British. She had seen the era of primitive republican sentiment before the days of Jackson, seen the contests between the Whigs and the Democrats, heard the rumblings and then the great blast of the Rebellion, the destruction of the Indians, the extension of Columbian liberty to the shining Pacific and beyond. She was not Cliff’s mother, nor Penelope’s. Rather, she was their grandmother, the both of them. And she had outlived both the son who had sired Cliff, and the daughter that sired Penelope. 

And she was still here.

Her skin was so wizened and worn that it appeared nearly like brittle paper. Her hands were crooked but possessed still of an amazing strength, as he’d learned to his horror once or twice. There was no senility or cloudy vacancy in her eyes. He imagined they must have looked much the same when she was a young girl. Her hair had turned a stark and solid white, save for the single streak of Blossom red. 

“Lady Blossom,” he said coldly, his stomach and throat near frozen. That was the way she was called by everyone in town. Of course, she held no title. This was America, after all. But it only seemed appropriate, so reverend and ageless was she. 

Billowing shadows passed across Rose Blossom's face. She watched him with those incisive blue eyes. 

“It’s a tad late, isn’t it?” 

“Forgive me—“ said Jughead. “I only wanted to see Cheryl.” It was half the truth. Because it _was_ true he was concerned for her, as much thanks to Keller’s attentions as to the general state of malady her brother’s two-time loss had left her in. 

“She’s fast asleep, now, my boy,” said Rose. 

“Of course.”

“Do you love her?”

“What?”

“Do you love darling Cheryl?” 

“I—“ This was no time to discourse on the peculiarities of love, and what precise sentiments ought to be classed as such. “Of course I do,” he said.

Rose shook her weary old head. Her august hand gripped one of the wheels of her chair, and she crept a few feet nearer to him. The shadows peeled back and allowed Jughead an obstructed view of the woman’s hard face.

“It isn’t your fault, my boy,” said Rose. “You could never love as such. You were not made the same. But because you couldn’t, I’m not certain this is the place for you.” He was used to the snide depreciation of his parentage and his origins from the Blossoms. They would admit him to the family with some reluctance, but they would never forget the dreck he’d slouched out of. But there was no malice in Rose’s voice. In fact he very nearly caught a thread of true concern in it. “Such as things are on this earth, they aren’t always—“ she cut herself short, and in fact retreated a foot or two into the library. Her chair creaked.

Jughead felt the hairs on the back of his neck prick upright. The shadows seemed to fall denser. The damnable light leaking from alcoves in the walls began to fail. 

“What are you talking about?” he demanded, rougher than intended. 

“Nothing,” said Rose, with a wrinkled and wary voice. “Nothing.” Her head spun to the side with remarkable speed. “Clifford and Penelope may be awake, yet.” And the way Rose pushed out each word suggested she dreaded that to be the case.

Jughead nodded, shaken. He did not want to stay here anymore. But he was not about to rush back out into the soggy night. So he bid Grandmother Blossom goodnight and hurried away down the pitch dark corridor.

He thought of Polly, miserably saddened. Who seemed to truly believe that the Blossoms to have orchestrated Jason’s demise. In the bowels of this rotting and ancient mansion, such theorizing seemed more than plausible. He shuddered. Who in this house would give him comfort?

His bride to be. Cheryl discomforted him at times (which was mad, of course. He would marry her soon.) but she still had more humanity in her than he’d ever detected in her relations. 

Jughead stole down the hallway. 

Then he stopped, for something writhed and turned in the dark shadow at the end of the corridor. Jughead took a step back, muscles working independent of the mind. The discordant flash of movement some fifty feet away split from the murk and strode off. Because it was a man. 

It was Jason Blossom. It had to be him. Jughead could not have mistaken another in his place. He saw with a perfect, almost preternatural clarity the particular shape of the slender young man with which he and every soul in the town of Riverdale was so eminently familiar. He saw the lad’s soft copper hair, neatly coiffed save for the errant spots at his temples and brow where a curl or two tumbled over his face. He marked out Jason’s fine, aquiline nose and the swell of his full lips. 

Jughead forced his eyes shut, opened them again. Jason was gone. He rushed to the end of the hall, ripping through shadow and gloom and finding nothing at all. He followed the sharp bend of the corridor angled towards Thornhill’s northern wing. Nothing. No disturbance in the dark, no phantom, and no man of flesh and blood. He was alone.

The fragmented, usually insignificant division of his mind given to superstition and senseless fright wanted to call out for the slain young man: “Jason! Jason, is that you?”

But the better part of his reason overcame, and he shook his head and determined to rationalize what he was so damned sure he had spied. 

Jason Blossom was dead. He was weary, he had walked all this way in the midnight fog, and the encounter with his father had put him into a dreadful humor. That was all. 

Or he was going mad.

He turned, back towards Cheryl’s room, struggling to suppress raw memory of the vision. He drew his fist back to knock. But he did not have to, and Cheryl must have sensed his presence, for the lock gave way without his announcement. 

Her fair skin tended warm, flushed red in the beaming light of a single candle. She breathed soft, standing close enough he could feel it on his skin. Bewitching, dun eyes watched him with singular interest. Her hair in its copper tangles, wild and undone. The night dress was sheer, and he could see the suggestion of her leg, the curve of a hip and slender waist. 

She was certainly a beauteous vision and his baser instincts were aroused, in spite of the preceding weeks’ rigors. 

Jughead felt a moment’s worth of guilt at the thought that he could not look very dashing himself. He was still buried in the thick and fraying great coat his father had passed down, itself soaked through by the relentless fog. His hair was wet and clung firmly to clammy, pallid skin. His boots were caked in mud and filth. 

But Cheryl smiled broadly. Her teeth gleamed bright beneath plump and ruby lips. She flung her arms around his neck.

“My darling,” she cooed with such sweet passion as she’d never addressed him. “Have you come to spend the night with me?” 

“I—“

He did not get a chance to answer. But if he had, he did not think he could have said no, burning as was the fire in his stomach and the tingling in his chest.

She pulled him back into her bedchamber, stripping away the soiled coat. His shirt and waistcoat were dry enough, and so it was all the easier for Cheryl to deftly unfasten the dull buttons and loose the strings, and be rid of the troublesome garments.

He looked once more into Cheryl’s bright and beautiful face, and was stricken by what he saw. She _was_ beautiful. There could be no doubt about that. But there was something else in the construction of her face. Something simple and essential that was nonetheless missing. As if in crafting such a radiant woman, the Creator had worked with frozen granite and failed to fix it with a spirit. And besides the lack of something, there was also an _additional_ something which he doubted she’d inherited from either Clifford or Penelope. It was wildly different, wild indeed, astral and vague, and something he had never seen in the eyes of another.

The beauty was so sharp and so violent that it was almost repulsive. But not as repulsive as she was enchanting. 

“I _do_ need you,” she whispered. And if he was not so enchanted, he would have noted the unnervingly clinical certainty she spoke with. But he was enchanted, and he forgot all but her, and perhaps somewhere, in a dismal corner of his conscious, the vision of her ghostly brother, wandering the corridors.


	3. shadow over Riverdale

Veronica pushed the boat away from the sandy shore, squealing with terror as she almost went spilling into the choppy black water. Betty grabbed her around the waist and yanked her back into the little dory. Veronica shivered and settled in, as near the center of the tiny vessel as she could manage. 

It was only about twelve feet long. The sea was not not placid. The moon flew high overhead and seemed to drag the currents in its wake. Sharp, hard swells knocked the dory about. Veronica was impressed at the strength Betty evidently possessed, in her ability to row the boat in such conditions. Seemingly without much effort. 

“I don’t know about this, B,” Veronica muttered. She stared down into the sea, dread piling up in her guts as they crept further from the beach, and from the safety of the land. The midnight ocean was black. She could not see half an inch beneath the rolling swells. Even when she shone their swinging old brakeman’s lantern over the water, it did little for visibility. It only turned the pitch sea into a sickly yellow-grey. 

Hangman’s Reef stood bare and long about half a mile out, washed by the intermittent rocking waves. Veronica swallowed.

“It’ll be fine, Veronica,” Betty assured her, with that charming smile beneath those warm eyes that could not fail to persuade. “Trust me. I’ve been out on these waters since I could walk.” There was a particularly rough set of swells, and Veronica gripped the gunwale for support. “Wait,” Betty said suddenly. “Can you swim?” 

“No,” said Veronica, very meek and worried. There were not a lot of swimming holes in Manhattan, and as far as she was concerned, swimming pools were for lounging and flirting, not  _ swimming _ . “Can you?”

“Of  _ course _ ,” said Betty. “I grew up here. We can all swim. But don’t worry. I won’t let you drown.” 

From anyone else, Veronica would have thought it was a quick joke. But it sounded entirely sincere from Betty, and it actually made her feel a little better. They had never decided what it was they were actually looking for. Some clue that Keller had somehow missed, but that the ocean would not have long carried away? Another encounter with the slimy creatures in the water? Veronica sincerely hoped to avoid the last one. 

Perhaps they were merely doing this out of boredom. 

“Are there sharks in these waters?” Veronica asked, striking a hard balance between gripping the sides of the boat and keeping her distance from the water.

“Definitely,” said Betty, and Veronica was not pleased with such a cavalier response. “Mostly harmless kinds, though,” said Betty. “Little sand sharks and that sort of thing. Once, though, Jason killed a  _ mammoth _ shark. They called it a white shark, I suppose. That’s what Jug’s books said, anyways. It was supposed to be a tropical monster, so God knows what it was doing in  _ our  _ waters. But the old lobstermen at the docks just called it the ‘Man-Eater shark’, because they said that sort of shark was well-known for devouring bathers and fishermen. We measured it, and it was about eighteen feet long from the tip of the nose to the end of the tail. Its mouth about this wide,” and Betty stopped rowing for a moment to spread her hands about two feet apart from one another in illustration of the fish’s massive jaws. “And—“

“Betty, I’m very sorry I asked. Never mind. Please, God, no more shark talk. Not out here.” 

“Sorry,” she said. And she dipped the oars back into the water and propelled them further from shore, and towards the gleaming sandbar in the distance.

Suddenly she gasped, and crooked her neck towards her shoulder.

“Ow!” Betty whimpered.

“Betty, I insist you see a doctor about those cramps.” 

Betty winced and released one oar for a moment to massage at her neck. Veronica held the lamp aloft. In its feeble light she could see what appeared to be the rashes running along her friend’s throat. Probably the result of zealous rubbing and scratching.

“We don’t actually have a doctor in town,” said Betty. “You have to go to Greendale for that.” 

“So what happens when someone breaks a leg? Like Mason did?” 

“Well, Tate was a surgeon’s assistant in the army. So he can usually patch people up until they can get to Greendale.”

“Sounds like a great system,” said Veronica, peering down into the water. The currents strengthened, carrying the little dory northward, towards the tip of the sandbar at the reef. Betty forced the paddles against the prevailing tide, to little avail. Veronica gripped the gunwales, tighter. “What exactly are we looking to find out here?”

“I don’t know,” said Betty. “Maybe we can sight one of those things again. Get a better look.” As she said so, Veronica swept the lantern further out over the sea. 

“I sincerely hope not,” said Veronica.

The current strengthened, carrying them further from shore. 

“You’re not scared, are you?” Betty teased.

“Well, I—“ her voice died down, for she saw a flash in the dark water. It was quick, and it lasted only a moment. But it was assuredly there. “Did you see it?”

“See what?” 

“In the water.” 

“Probably a fish,” said Betty. She tried to row them a bit closer to shore, but the current would not allow it. 

“It was big.” Veronica’s stomach turned, and she thought of Jason’s shark. She imagined a gruesome mouth ringed with jagged teeth hurtling from the black sea. A fish like the one Betty had described, eighteen feet in length, could scissor their miserable little skiff in half with a single crack of its great jaws. And devour the two of them, helpless in the water. “Maybe we should go back,” she said, her voice trembling.

“Hold the lantern out,” said Betty. “Where you saw something move.” Veronica swallowed and stretched her arm again, loath to suspend any part of her body over the edge of the boat.

The tides blew them nearer Hangman’s Reef, with such precise direction Veronica felt almost like they were being  _ pulled  _ there. Her stomach coiled tighter. 

The boat jolted. Something had passed under it. Veronica’s breathing increased in pace.

“What was that?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” said Betty in her less than certain voice. “Just a wave.”

“No, it wasn’t!” Veronica insisted. “You felt it! Something went under us!” 

“It’s just waves,” she repeated.

Another dark streak through the darker water, just between the crests of two waves. Both saw this one. Veronica swung the lantern back to Betty’s face, and watched her green eyes widen. It killed much of her courage to see such fear in the eyes of her friend, who was so much better attuned to this coast and to this little town than she was.

“Can we please go back?” Veronica asked one more time.

Betty was about to respond when it happened. 

The ghoulish hand melted from the water, twisted and scaly and rough. Five fingers, like a man’s, each terminating in a dripping ebony claw, linked by a vile, translucent webbing. The fingers curled round the gunwale. 

Veronica screamed. Then Betty screamed. The claws dug deep into the wood. The waves a few feet away split, and the creature’s domed, glistening head rose into the light.

Veronica did what she did free from conscious determination. She smashed the lantern hard against the malformed hand. The light shattered, and their faces shone in the brief flash of golden fire. Splinters of glass lacerated the monster’s mottled skin. The hand shrank back beneath the seething water, and a ghastly howl of pain rent the air, and then waves washed over the boiling sea where the devil had been, and the only sound was the cracking surf. 

And then everything was dark, and Veronica was holding a broken, lightless lantern in her hand.

“Oh my God,” she gasped. “Oh my God. What was th—“

“I don’t know!” Betty squealed. She reached out for one of the oars. 

“No!” Veronica whimpered. “Don’t! What if it hears us?”

Betty drew her hand back towards her chest. 

“Veronic—“

“What was that?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Never. I—“ she covered her own mouth, as something rubbed against the side of the boat. 

“Oh God,” Veronica moaned again.

They lay down in the center of the dory, quiet as could be beneath the simmering moon. Hoping to God the thing—or things—would just let them be. Veronica peeked over the edge of the bow. The shore was some hundred yards away. Hangman’s Reef some fifty in the other direction. The current pulled them further from the white beach. 

Veronica nestled her head against Betty’s shoulder and prayed in short, violent bursts of English and Spanish. Betty sat in stunned and total silence. The waves calmed, just a little, and took to lapping with less vigor against the flanks of the skiff.

They drifted nearer to Hangman’s Reef, Veronica dreading with every creeping foot that the thing—or a horde of its brethren—would surge up from the lightless deep, pull them down into the water and then—well, she did not want to think far beyond that. She begged the powers with every shallow breath to please bring the boat up on the shore.

It took an hour with the slow, lazy current. But at last, the dory washed up on the shore of Hangman’s Reef. The girls jumped out, and rushed to the center of the narrow little sandbar. It was not very wide, only about fifty feet at its broadest point. So they hurried to the spot equidistant from ocean on either end, and huddled there together, watching the cold sea rush and swirl around them, chill with menace. The breeze swept up in the east, and even hanging together they could do little to stay its violent sting on the bare skin of their faces and arms. 

They remained for hours, while the moon continued its arduous journey through the star-speckled sky. 

It was about an hour before sunrise, when the very first slivers of hopeful light gathered on the far horizon, that Betty saw it. “Oh God,” she whimpered, and extended a hand towards the black water that slowly wavered toward green in the ascending sun. 

There, about fifty feet from shore, on the ocean side of the reef, the bald, domed head bobbed gently in the swells. Scaly and rough, just like the revolting hand. A set of fluttering gills on either side of its wrinkled throat. It dropped its grotesque jaw to reveal rows of glinting needle teeth, just under a pair of bulbous yellow eyes. 

That was the first. Then a number of identical faces slipped up through the lapses in the waves, twisted and terrible. Four. Five. Finally ten. They watched the girls for some time, golden eyes flickering and fading under the gathering sun.

And then they sank into the water, and they were gone. 

* * *

Jughead stole through the streets of the sprawling cyclopean city. Overhead the sky rolled and tore itself, and mended again in flashes of white and blue. And he understood—the city was beneath the sea. In the colorless depths where nothing could survive. 

The green, slime-decked walls thrust up towards the surface, and thence toward heaven. He was intensely, horribly alone. Not only because nothing moved but him in all the great metropolis. He felt in some cosmic, eternal manner he was truly alone. Separated from all else that was.

Except for the towering, dreadful thing that stalked him through these bleak thoroughfares. The ground rumbled beneath his feet.

And then, some fifty meters away, coming out from the darkness, Jason Blossom. This time, he was grinning. 

And he awoke, this time managing to strangle the cry in his throat. He clutched his chest. Jughead looked to his left. Cheryl was still unconscious, red hair tumbling in waves over her pillow, breathing slightly.

“Jesus Christ,” Jughead muttered aloud. 

Cheryl shifted beside him.

The dream was vivid. Worse than before. And he’d had the last one seated across from Cheryl in Thornhill’s drawing room. And this one beside her in bed.

He felt a strange inkling of guilt. He did not know why he should. Why should a man feel guilty for sleeping with his wife? Now granted, they were not married yet. But they would be. And he was never a stickler for convention. 

Regardless. He slipped out of bed, shaking his head. And he was naked. Jughead replaced his pants with some rapidity, as if he was afraid they would be intruded upon, though there was little danger of that.

The trousers were still soaked with last night’s fog. Peeking through Cheryl’s window, he could see said mist had not abated, and still hung in its sordid canopy over town. He heard the sea boom distantly.

Jughead stumbled out of Cheryl’s bedchambers, wondering if Clifford or Penelope would eviscerate him for hunting up some food in the downstairs kitchen. He rambled into the quiet hall, only that much less eerie bathed in weak sun. He ran a hand through his tousled hair.

Slipping past the library, he thought of his eerie encounter the previous night with Lady Blossom. He clenched his jaw, determining not to let the ramblings of an old woman frighten him in the broad light of day. 

But he stopped because voices emanated from therein again. Not Lady Blossom’s this time. Cliff. And Penelope’s. 

“Keller wants to take her for the killer,” Penelope hissed. “Clear as day.” 

Speaking of Keller’s interrogation of Cheryl, no doubt. He retraced a few steps, stopping just before the library doors, so that he could begin walking again and have a plausible excuse should they emerge. 

“Perhaps that is for the best,” said Cliff.

What? Jughead felt his heart throb, and pause, and resume a faster, panicked beat. 

“For the best?” hissed Penelope. “You’ve gone insane! And they’ll do what with her? Put her in a cell?” She scoffed, loud. “To what end? No. You’ve said yourself  _ we  _ must see this through.” 

Jughead’s throat closed. He brought an unconscious hand to his neck. 

“Listen to me,” said Cliff. “I said that  _ I  _ would deal with her, but if I don’t—“

“Then  _ that  _ is what you will do,” Penelope snapped.

Jughead nearly doubled over with the shock of the revelation. So then the proposition that the Blossoms had killed Jason seemed suddenly very credible. And perhaps, for whatever inscrutable purpose, they intended to kill their daughter now, too? He was cold, from the crown of his skull to the ends of his toes.

“Yes,” said Cliff. 

“And the book?” asked Penelope.

“Of course,” Cliff’s prompt response. “It’s dealt with.” 

“Is it really  _ necessary _ ?”

“Absolutely. Without the book, there’s no chance of—“ A momentary arrest in the dialogue. “Listen, what we need—“

“What we need, man!” Penelope said. “What we need is Keller placated and his nose out of our damn affairs! God knows what will come of his sniffing round. Better he arrest some crabber or loafing beggar from the southside, and give us space to handle this ourselves.” 

Jughead hurried past the library, quick as he could go. He flew down to the dining room. What were his courses of action? He could tell Constable Keller, of course. As if he’d be believed. His word, that of an impecunious sailor’s son who had every reason to want his fiancée’s wealthy parents removed from the stage. 

And who else was there to tell? Cheryl herself? He must, at least. Her life might very well be in danger. Would  _ she  _ believe him? Great God.

He sat at the table, and chewed on a piece of bread and a hunk of cheese.

Only minutes later, Clifford and Penelope descended the grand staircase, dressed in their heavy clothes fit for the dreary weather beyond. They meant to go out.

“Ah,” said Clifford. “Mr. Jones. We didn’t know you’d come.” He’d told them many times they’d call him Jughead if they liked. They’d not deigned to take him up on the offer, and he very much doubted they would. 

“I came last night,” he said, hoping no distress shone on his lips or in his eyes. 

“Of course,” Penelope smiled. Her eyes dropped to the morsel in his trembling hand. “And you  _ are  _ welcome to anything in the pantry or the ice box. I am aware you are not used to such…abundance.” 

Jughead ignored the calculated slight. “Of course,” he said. “Hospitality is appreciated. As always.”

“We’re going into town,” said Clifford. He pulled on his gloves.

“Don’t let Cheryl sleep too late, darling,” Penelope finished, with affected care.

“I won’t,” she said. 

And then they were through the doors and out into the morning fog.

Jughead waited a minute. Then he thumped the dining room table with his fist and swore. 

A little while later, he headed back upstairs. Towards the library.

What book had they meant?

* * *

“We really mean to go into that house?” Veronica asked.

Thornhill sat before them, perched atop its sandy hill like a squat toad with a hundred dull glass eyes. 

The awful manor looked primed to spring to life and swallow them both up. 

“Yes,” said Betty. And she swallowed hard, green eyes bright. “We do.” 

“This town, eh?” Veronica said weakly. 

“It’s just a mansion,” said Betty, the tenor of her voice suggesting she meant to persuade herself more than her friend. “I’m sure you had one of your own?” 

Again, from anyone else, Veronica would have thought that a snide barb. But it sounded completely sincere in the mouth of Elizabeth Cooper.

“Not like this,” Veronica replied. She mustered a nervous laugh.

“Let’s go,” Betty urged, and she led the way up the weedy pathway to the mansion’s doors. 

“Will he even believe us?” Veronica asked. “I—why don’t we tell Constable Keller? He is the law here, isn’t he?”

“Jughead  _ might  _ believe us about the fish people. Constable Keller will most certainly  _ not  _ believe us about the fish people.” 

They slipped past the iron-wrought gates that hung slightly open, as they always did. No one much feared robbers in Riverdale, not even the wealthiest family in the town. 

Up to the heavy oak doors. Betty lifted the knocker and let it fall. The booming sound produced rang through the hollow halls and chambers of the mansion. And there was no other response. 

They had spent the night cowering on the sandbar, watching the sea with a savage, animal terror. When the sun had risen, they waited another hour, and then another three, before they paddled back to shore with the agonizing sloth of a wounded turtle. Every dip in the waves, every line of gentle bubbles sent them into wild spasms of terror. Once a sturgeon slithered by the dory’s stern, and Veronica nearly went over the other end of the boat in fright. 

When they’d made landfall, they fell into each other’s arms, embracing the dry earth and laughing madly at the miracle of their preservation. 

And then Betty suggested they ought to tell someone what they had seen. Not the town’s single lawman, but her friend Jughead. Who she was very much fond of, as Veronica had long learned. And who would probably be at Thornhill Mansion, taking advantage of a warm bed for the first time in his young life.

Veronica gently removed her friend to the side and brought the knocker down onto the door herself, as if it might produce a different result. Still nothing.

And so Betty pushed at the door. And it opened.

“Do we—“ Veronica tried to say.

Betty answered by stepping inside. Her footsteps sounded off into the depths of Thornhill.

“Okay, in all honesty,” Veronica said. “Why  _ should  _ anyone believe us? For God’s sakes, _The_ _Fi_ _ shmen of Hangman’s Reef _ ? It sounds like a dreadful pulp adventure!”

“Jughead will at least hear us out,” Betty replied. 

Veronica took in the grim, vaulted parlor before the grand staircase. 

“Jughead?” Betty called. Nothing.

“And if the Blossoms realize we’ve effectively broken into their home?”

“The automobile was gone,” said Betty. “Clifford and Penelope aren’t here, at least.”

They stepped cautiously toward the drawing room, as if each footfall threatened to awaken  _ something _ . 

“You saw them?”

The two girls cried out. Veronica actually shrank into Betty’s arms, and her friend accommodated her in a saving embrace. A shadow twitched in the threshold of the drawing room. And then it melted into a frail and ancient woman slumped into a wheelchair. 

The Lady Blossom moved towards them. Her wizened face bore something dreadful and even stricken. Her blue eyes flashed the light of centuries.

“L—Lady Blossom,” Betty greeted her with a poor and helpless tongue. Veronica clutched her arm in desperate revulsion. 

“I heard you. Speaking of the Hangman’s Reef. And  _ fish men _ .”

“Oh!” Betty’s ventured to mask her dread, and did not succeed. “We—were talking about a motion picture Veronica saw in Manhattan.”

“It was of very low quality,” Veronica cleaved to the moment’s fiction. “From the same gentlemen that produced that terrible _The_ _Werewolf_ , picture a few years back. I would not recommend it.” 

“You  _ saw them _ ,” Rose Blossom hissed, drawing closer. One of her ancient hands thrust forward and clapped itself like a weighty manacle round Veronica’s wrist. She squealed. Such strength in the old woman’s bones. She felt there was no hope she could ever break the hold. 

Betty quick dropped their invented ‘motion picture’ ruse. 

“What—what do you know about them?” She asked, leaning in towards the old woman. 

“Betty!” Veronica hissed.

Betty ignored her.

“You saw them,” Rose repeated. Her eyes rolled loosely in her head, as if they meant to flee from some nearing menace. “Oh, great God, you saw them!” 

“What are they?” Betty begged.

Rose collected herself. She lurched forwards in her chair, breathing in spurts of tempered panic. 

“You must write the government!” Rose hissed. She dug her cruel fingers into Veronica’s wrist. “Ask them to send soldiers! Horsemen and riflemen and cannoneers!”

“Please talk to us!” Veronica half-sobbed. The terror seeped into her marrow. 

“You want to know…oh…oh you must know!”

“Tell us,” Betty said, in as steady and coaxing a tone as she could slip through her teeth. “Tell us, please.”

“My father,” Rose coughed terribly. “My father, he was Marius Blossom. A sailor, you know, in the days when men were iron and ships were wood.” She laughed, with more power and vigor than her old lungs ought to have sustained. “He was not a good man. Oh, no! If you displeased him, well he was liable to beat you so that you could not walk!” She snapped her jaws, and Veronica lurched back. “You see, my father believed in very little, save himself. Yes, yes. Himself. My grandfather was a man of faith, a man of God. And he prayed so often.” Rose raised her face to heaven, like to catch the distant eyes of her long-perished grandfather. “‘Our father, who art in heaven’,” she intoned in her stony voice. “My father did not pray. He said it did no one any good, and what a man needed he would get for himself. He was a soldier, you see. He fought against the pirates of Tripoli, and he fought against the English on the seas. But when I was born—ah, that was the year that great Napoleon died, I always remember this. 1821!

“When I was born, there were no more wars,” she said. “This was the age of peace, before the rebels rent our republic. When we were all one, and we were united under the flag. So my father was a sailor under a peaceful flag. But my father was not a man who cherished peace. In war, he said, he could match himself against other men. It made him a full and true man, he said. And that was what he longed for. Glory. The power and the glory that my grandfather said was only due to the Lord. And my brother Edward, he wished to be just as father. The poor boy.” She pressed a fist to her lips, and an ancient sob long contained burst in her chest. “Oh, Edward!” and her face was turned to heaven, searching for her brother beyond the firmament of this world. “When I was a girl of eleven years old, my father was captain of his own vessel. The  _ Selkie _ , it was called. A mighty frigate, it was. And the day after my birthday, he set off on another voyage, to sail the great Pacific Ocean, he said. He was gone so long. So long…and we did not learn what had transpired, until he came home again. For you see—

Rose extended a single, rigid finger towards her audience. Both girls pulled away. She smiled. 

“For you see,” she continued. “In the islands of the South Pacific, I should think somewhere off of Hawai’i, or perhaps New South Wales—he met a strange tribe of savages. Very queer gentlemen, these heathens! They worshipped a set of great gods what dwelt under the sea. And these gods—they maintained for themselves a race of servants, and these were things that were somewhere lost between fish and man—this was before Mr. Darwin, and no one could quite make sense of that. And every year, the tribesmen would offer a lot of their finest maidens and their stout good lads to these fish-men who lived in the waters, and these creatures would in turn sacrifice them to the gods. And the fish-men—the things, in return they would drive more fish into the coves and inlets than the natives could bear, so that they became the mightiest and the wealthiest people in all the islands. And in war, the things would come out from the sea, and they would wipe out the enemies of the tribesmen. And besides all that, they would dredge up from the very deepest basins in the sea these beauteous golden and silver bracelets and crowns and ringlets and bucklers and even swords, all covered in wonderful jewels and banded round with even more precious metal, and bequeath them unto the natives. And all they asked in return, was two concessions. Just two, that was all that they asked. The first was the sacrifice. I’ve told you about that. But more than that—they asked that the great chief gift more handsome young fellows and pretty maidens, so that the things could mix their blood with human. And when the children would come out, they’d be somewhere between the human and these things. And they’d be born looking like any lad or any girl, but as they grew, and they grew bigger, they become more and more like the fish-things. Until finally they couldn’t stand it on the land anymore, and they had to slip into the water, to join their brothers in their great cities under the seas, and worshipping their terrible gods forever. And that was all the things asked, for all of the gold and power and the glory that these savages could wish for. And to my father! 

She laughed again, so high and pained that it neared a scream. 

“To my father, this hardly seemed a poor bargain at all! So he came home on his great ship. And I was thirteen years old, then. Oh, 1834 I guess it must have been. And he came into the house, and he found all our bibles, and he burned them in the hearth. I begged and begged him not to burn my psalms, and Edward fell at father’s feet pleading and asking him to let alone grandfather’s old cross and his book of prayers.” Real and miserable tears bloomed in Rose’s weary eyes. “But he ripped them right out of our hands, and they went in the fire. And father said that Jehovah was dead, and now we had new gods, and they would bring us real reward and we would see them to know they were real, that they were not silent ghosts like Christ. And that very night, he dragged poor old grandfather out of his bed—he was so sick already—with some sailors from the  _ Selkie _ . And they cut his throat right there on the step, and we screamed and screamed and father said if we breathed a word he’d cut our throats, too.” 

Veronica nearly wanted to vomit. She didn’t believe a word of it. Of course not. It was insane. Except that she had seen the things in the water. She had seen that awful hand creep over the gunwale, with those evil claws. Oh God—

“And I watched from my window,” Rose went on, the tears dribbling into her mouth. “I watched, just a little girl, me. With Edward next to me. We watched and we saw father and his sailors rowing out to Hangman’s Reef with poor grandfather’s body in the whaling boat. And at the reef they dumped the miserable remains into the deep water, past the reef, in the deep ocean. And I saw them standing on the rocks, and father’s arms were raised, and—oh, God! I heard a  _ new  _ prayer. Not ‘our father who art in heaven’. I heard a  _ new  _ prayer. I wish I’d never seen. I wish I’d never heard.” Rose raised her crooked and feeble arms over her head, like a preacher. “ _ Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nahf Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”  _ Cried Nana Rose. The manner Rose spoke, as if every word twisted her lips and strained her jaw to agonizing extremes. As if the evil prayer was not fashioned for the throats of men and sat ill in human mouths. “And then—“ said Rose, and her voice dropped into a hideous drone like the sea raking over sand. “And then I saw the shapes coming up out of the water. Not fish and not quite men. And thank God, if there is such a one after all, that I could not hear a thing they said. If they spoke in any way like we understand it. And just like they’d done for those savages in the Pacific, the fish flooded Riverdale, they flooded up into Sweetwater River, we found them dying on the beach. And mingled in with the fish, these beautiful bits of treasure, these tiaras and these gauntlets of the finest gold. And we became wealthier than we might have ever hoped. For these things were everywhere in the world, my father said. Just as men have their cities in Siam, or China, or Mexico, or England, these sea-things had their great cities under the water in the Atlantic, in the Pacific, the Mediterranean. I don’t think anyone in town ever really knew. They still don’t. But there were so many fish, and so much gold that our family could not take it all. So the townspeople took their part, and they turned their heads when young men and women disappeared, so that my father could appease the fish men and keep the coffers and the harbor full. But soon that wasn’t enough. Can you believe it? All that treasure, all those fish, all those wondrous things. Not enough for my father.

She coughed again.

“So the sea things told him that there was more. There would be more. They said they could give him the might and the power no mortal man had ever enjoyed. And that was all he’d ever wanted. And all they wanted was one thing. Because the chief of this under-city off the coast, his daughter needed a bride-groom.” Rose shut her eyes, awash in the old and unsealed pain. “And they asked for dear Edward. And Edward told my father he would die before he did such a thing. And father told Edward that if he refused, he would not cut his throat, he would cut  _ mine _ . And so my brother, God rest his soul. To save  _ me  _ from our tyrant father—he took that sea thing for his wife. Great God!

Betty covered her mouth, green eyes dull and swimming with revulsion. 

“And he got children on her, too. My nephew, William” Rose hissed. “He was just a normal boy, a sweet little lad when he was born. And he looked fine and handsome until he was near thirty years of age. He married and all, and had a daughter. But Edward knew what would become of his son, and he couldn’t bear it, and he cut his own throat before William’s twentieth birthday. And William, when he learned what  _ our _ father had done, what his  _ grandfather  _ had done, when he truly understood what  _ he himself  _ really was, as a matter of the blood—he left the family. He changed his name and went aside. And then you saw less and less of him, and soon after his thirty-third year, they said he drowned while fishing off Hangman’s Reef. But I suppose he really just became too much fish and went into the sea.” She whimpered. “Oh, God—and that great power and glory the sea things promised my father. Well, it wasn’t enough. But thank God, the old devil died before he could offer them any more. But the others, they kept trying—“

“What others?” Betty suddenly demanded, and she looked on the verge of lunging forward and grabbing Rose by the collar. 

But Rose fell silent. She stared right through Betty, through Veronica, at sheer nothing. If it had not been for the subtle motions of her eyes and the shallow breaths animating her chest, Veronica would have thought she’d exerted herself to a heart attack. 

“L-Lady Blossom?” Veronica asked. 

She said nothing more.

Then—“what are you fellas doing here?”

They leapt at the new and distinct voice. But then recognized it. 

Jughead stood at the midway point of the grand staircase, buried in a thick robe half-cinched around the waist. There was a revolver in his hand—one of Clifford’s, presumably—which he sheepishly put away upon identifying the intruders as his friends. 

He descended the stairs, looking rather exhausted, and jammed the pistol into the belt of his robe in a flagrant show of disregard for the lethality of firearms. 

“What is the matter?” he said. “Why are you here?”

“We came to talk to you,” Veronica blurted out, still smarting under the weight of Rose’s story. “Betty did.” 

Jughead turned to appraise his old friend. 

Betty returned the gaze with a hopeless uncertainty, well aware there was really no way in which to broach the subject she’d come to broach that did not include the mention of ‘fishmen’ or an equivalent term.

Rose sat stiff in her chair, fingers curled into the rims of the wheels, eyes still flat and scarcely blinking. 

Jughead knelt down and stared her full in the face, and was disturbed by what he saw.

“Lady Blossom?” He waved a hand before her face. Her eyes failed to follow.

“She’s not a dog, Jughead,” Veronica said brusquely. 

“I—is she okay?” Betty fidgeted in nervous ardor.

“She’ll be fine,” Jughead shook his own head. “It happens sometimes. Just these…spells.” He made an about-face. “And you two? What is the matter?” 

“We went out to Hangman’s Reef last night,” said Betty. 

“Why?” Jughead asked. It was certainly not a common destination for a moonlit swim. 

“Those things…that we saw,” said Betty. 

Before she could unburden herself with the night’s terrors, there was another flash of motion at the head of the stairs. Cheryl appeared, attired in a simple and ignoble robe, eyes tight with sleep. 

“What are you wastrels doing under my roof?” she demanded. Then she spied Rose among the gathering crowd. “Frightening my poor great-grandmother to death?” 

“They just came to—“ Jughead tried to mount a defense of his friends, but then found he could not because he did not himself know the reason for their visit. 

Cheryl leaned over the railing along Thornhill’s second level. 

“I think you all ought to leave,” she spoke and left little room to contest. 

Jughead turned to the two women. 

“Cher—“ he tried to say.

“I mean it—I wish to prepare some things for my brother’s memorial. And I prefer to do that in solitude.”

Rose Blossom remained in her calcified state, and offered one of her rare blinks. 

“As you wish,” Jughead said.

* * *

Consequent of their expulsion from Thornhill, the three set a course for town. Betty was glad they had not spent much time in the place. Even without Rose’s eerie story, the old manor had a way of exciting her worst fears and incubating a terrible, nearly alien dread in her breast.

It was Veronica who recounted what they had seen the previous night on Hangman’s Reef. Jughead listened intently, hardly indicating whether or not he was disposed to lend the tale any credence. Betty watched his blue eyes and the corners of his lips closely, for she’d known him a long time and learned that these were the best markers of his attitude towards anything. 

His eyes did not move much as they walked, fixed perfectly forward. His mouth moved only by minute twitches of the muscles. She took that mean he  _ was  _ considering their tale, and at least not dismissing it out of hand. 

But if he had, she could hardly blame him. She still troubled herself believing her own eyes. Fish-men. But how could it be otherwise? She  _ had  _ seen them—and then Rose’s story. That was no coincidence.

But what did that  _ mean _ ? That the Blossoms were in  _ league _ with those things? Had even  _ bred  _ with them? She recalled Rose’s evil memory of sacrifices to the monsters in the water. God, what if  _ Jason  _ had been a sacrifice? 

Veronica finished the story. 

Jughead nodded. They were coming up on main street, now.

Silence reigned for a dreadful moment.

“You don’t believe us,” Veronica charged.

“I—“ Jughead’s voice fought its way from his throat. “I certainly don’t believe you’re lying to me. I believe you saw something th—“

“Oh, no!” Betty erupted, slighted by the sentence that had not yet left his lips. “I will suffer a lot of your nonsense, Jughead Jones! But I will  _ not  _ suffer condescension! You know if you came to me insisting you saw a dragon by Sweetwater River I’d believe you without hesitation!” 

His shoulders tensed, as did the muscles in his neck. She glowered at him, and his blue eyes offered tacit apology or a tacit admission of surrender. The look could mean either, depending upon precise circumstances. 

The truth was, Betty desperately wanted him to believe her. They were always drawn together by a shared love of the bizarre and the inexplicable (or rather that which  _ seemed  _ inexplicable, but would certainly be made sense of with some effort). Betty remembered sitting on their rock at the beach, taking turns reading  _ the Hound of the Baskervilles  _ aloud to one another, as the fog enveloped them. When they were ten, Jughead had sworn blind to everyone prepared to listen that he’d hooked a swordfish three times his size, but that it had broken the line and gotten away. It had not been a matter of great importance, but it had clearly hurt him to be laughed at by the fishermen and the boys in town. “I believe you, Juggie,” Betty had told him, and he smiled and held her hand.

Then, a few days later, a group of fishermen hooked the very same swordfish, with Jughead’s line still dangling from its mouth.

So that was why Betty so wanted him to believe them, even if she did not fully believe herself.

“Okay,” Jughead said. “Your fishmen sighting is one matter. Lady Blossom’s story is another. A Blossom wouldn’t marry his son to an Italian or a Greek, much less a fish.” 

“Well, they married their daughter to  _ you _ ,” Veronica said. Jughead shot her a look. Betty couldn’t help but laugh a little. Now it was her turn for Jughead’s look, and she shot him one back. 

They came to the Riverdale Register, shuddering under the strong marine wind. 

“We did see those things,” Betty affirmed. “And we’ll have proof of it, one way or another.” 

Jughead walked and spoke a bit rigidly, and Betty got the sense that he himself was burdened by something seen or heard, that he wished but did not dare to share. She could always read him. But she decided not to press him on it. 

“Okay,” he said, with regard to Betty’s pronouncement regarding proof of the fish people. “But with all do respect, considering there’s been a murder, are the fish people really priority?”

“They’re  _ fish people _ !” Veronica exclaimed, as if that was reason enough. 

They stepped into the Register.

Alice leapt up from her chair, rushed her daughter, and clasped her rudely around the shoulders. Jughead and Veronica shrank back.

“Where in God’s name have you been, girl?” Alice demanded.

“I—I—“

“You vanish in the middle of the night, and you return in the morning with—we were  _ terrified _ ! There’s a killer on the loose for God’s sakes!” 

Betty’s throat and chest iced over. Her mother rarely summoned such fury, and when she did, it was truly a sight to behold. Not that it was one she  _ wished  _ to behold. 

“Moth—“

“You two!” Alice hissed. “Where were you? Where was  _ she _ ?”

Jughead and Veronica looked helplessly to Betty, unsure whether anything they would say risked being turned against her. No matter, because Alice was done with them and her attention returned to Betty.

“Where were you?” Alice repeated, shaking her daughter forcefully.

“Veronica and I—we took the boat out to Hangman’s Reef. But we got stuck overnight an—“

“Hangman’s Reef?”

“Yes,” said Betty, tongue near-leaden in her mouth. 

“Why in the hell would you go to Hangman’s Reef?” Alice implored, and Betty thought that her mother sounded in equal measure distressed, even frightened. “ _ Why _ ?”

“We were just hoping—we might find something to do with Jas—“

“You are never,  _ never  _ to row out to Hangman’s Reef after nightfall again, do you understand? Do you?  _ Or  _ in the day for that matter!” 

“Yes, mother,” Betty bleated.

There was a shuffling in the back rooms. “Let her alone, Alice,” said the guttural voice. Hal Cooper emerged from his self-imposed seclusion. 

Betty did not see her father much lately. Only marginally more than did the others in the town. 

He wore as usual his black woolen greatcoat, the one that bunched around his shoulders and dragged in the muck behind him. A thick pair of gloves over his trembling hands, for the fever that afflicted him chronically caused shaking and a sense of extreme cold. A dark scarf wrapped around his throat, and his face sat in the shadow of a broad-brimmed hat. He coughed wetly, and it sounded as if his breaths were great labors. In his right hand he gripped the solid oaken cane that bore his trembling weight along.

“Mr. Cooper,” Veronica greeted. Betty caught the uncertainty and the guarded tone in her voice.

Hal inclined his head. 

“Miss Lodge.” Then to Jughead: “Jughead.” 

“You’re looking well,” Jughead lied. 

Hal might have smiled, though it was difficult to see beneath the hat and scarf. 

“Don’t lie to me, son.” He ambled towards the kitchen.

Alice, having a minute to compose herself, had calmed at least marginally. But her next act was to jab accusing fingers at her daughter’s friends. “You two. Out.”

They did not need to be told twice, and eager to be out from under her power, slipped back out onto Main Street. 

Alice took Betty’s hands, and a genuine maternal love joined the fear in her eyes. 

“I’m sorry, love. But please, please don’t frighten me or your father like this. Especially not out by that…goddamned reef.”

Alice Cooper hardly swore.

Betty nodded. No use in antagonizing her mother.

“Yes, mother.”

Alice patted her cheek.

“Good girl. Go take your sister her breakfast, won’t you?”

“Yes, mother.” 

Betty collected the scant meal of ham and eggs from the little kitchen and bore it into the back rooms. Polly’s mobility was less and less, as her pregnancy developed. And the compounded sorrow of Jason’s loss did not help matters. So Betty did not mind bringing her meals. 

But the truth was, she had not been in good health either, as of late. The cramps she dismissed to Veronica were in fact proving a debilitating nuisance. Often she woke up in the middle of the night, her stomach convulsing with aches so terrible Betty felt as if someone was driving a sword into her belly. And she would lie there, listening to the surf boom, until it abated. And often her neck was so stiff she could hardly twist her head. 

She surmised it was in part at least due to the mentally taxing reality of Jason’s death and its profound disturbance of the little town’s predictable mundanity. 

And it did not help that she just could not stop thinking about those  _ things  _ in the water. And Rose’s story. She said that her brother had been forced to  _ wed  _ one of the fish people. And that their children had come out human at first but…she wondered if any of the things she and Veronica had seen that night had once been men or women. 

Betty shivered.

She knocked.

“Come in, Betty!”

Betty entered the room. Polly lay back in her bed, hands folded over her swollen stomach. A dog-eared copy of  _ Tarzan of the Apes  _ sat upon her night table. But Polly’s eyes were closed, and had she not called out a moment ago she would have looked to be at perfect rest.

“Breakfast, Pol?”

Polly’s lovely blue eyes opened, misty and dreamy.

“Thank you, Betty,” Polly reached up to embrace her sister as Betty set down the platter beside her bed. 

There was a wide, liberated smile on her face, that served immediately to unnerve Betty. She had been in such dim moods for the past several weeks and months.

“Feeling better, Polly?” Betty asked tentatively.

“Better than better,” Polly asserted. Her smile widened. She did not take her hands from her belly. 

“That’s good,” said Betty. She rubbed her sister’s shoulder. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“It’s Jason!” Polly exclaimed. Her face was so lustrous, so radiant and white with joy. It hardly seemed right. 

“What about him?” 

“He’s here again.” Polly closed her eyes once more. “I know it. I know it.” The smile shrank into a sweeter, subtler expression. “Oh, I know it. I love him so. And he loves me.” 

Betty watched her sister through the corner of an eye. Her sister was not generally given to mysticism or theosophist musing. But she was a young woman with child, who had lost the father of that child. And, Betty remembered, the medicines Alice had surreptitiously procured for her pregnant daughter in the city. Such reveries in this state were forgivable. The pills likely played a part.

Betty kissed her sister on the forehead.

“Well, I hope you feel even better.”

Then she left her alone, and Betty wondered if her mother was the only soul in this house in the bloom of health. If even her.


	4. in his house at R'lyeh dead

Jughead and Veronica parted a block from the Register. Jughead was unsure he would be welcomed back to Thornhill so soon, and so he wandered aimlessly towards the wharves, where he intended to watch the sea for a while, as he informed Veronica.

Veronica decided it would be prudent to return to her own mother, in the once-splendorous 19th century house with two slanting stories that they’d leased not too far from the Southside. 

It had rained hard the night before, and Veronica’s dress was only just drying. The hem of the skirts were still speckled with sand and mud, the price of huddling on a sandbar til sunrise. Nevertheless, she hiked up her skirts to avoid the ubiquitous puddles or the scattered refuse that became more common the further one drifted towards southwards.

There was an ancient railroad trestle bisecting the town. It had never even been completed, for the railroad company had gone belly up before it could be joined to the greater lines steaming southwards to New York. Now there was only the half-finished stretch of steel and iron, winding sharp towards the sea and stopping short of the waves by some hundred meters. It served as the unofficial line of demarcation between the two halves of Riverdale. 

She followed the tracks for a while, running parallel to the seashore. Veronica wrinkled her face in raw disgust when her foot sank into a pit in the road filled with fetid water. 

Only a number of rotting blocks from her house, she passed the boathouse at the docks. It was largely empty so early in the morning, as the fishermen had already set out for the day and would not be back for some hours. Indeed, she could see a number of the little vessels bobbing out on the horizon, flashes of color amidst the wastes of green-grey sea. 

But today she heard voices. Something compelled her to stop and listen. She did not know why she should. It was likely just some crabbers or bums in wasteful argumentation. 

Except that she recognized one of the voices. It was Clifford Blossom’s. She’d heard him speak enough to recognize the even, irritable tone. She stepped off of the road, approaching the boathouse at a slanted angle. Casks of oils and seasoned fish lined the docks, right up against the water. She slipped behind the nearest row, so that there was only about a foot of dock between her and the dark water. Veronica reminded herself she could not swim. That just meant she would have to be especially careful. 

She crept along the row of barrels until she came out at the other side of the boat house, and she caught sight of her quarry. It _was_ Clifford Blossom, wearing his fine Parisian coat and his polished boots and silver cufflinks. His wife hung beside him, dressed in the same manner of simple country gentry. 

Of greater interest was the object of their ire, standing some two feet before them. It was FP Jones, Jughead’s father. 

Veronica spied him now and again roaming the streets with no apparent purpose save to discomfit the more respectable of Riverdale’s social strata. He was still handsome, tall and strong, though his eyes were ever-rimmed with red and he seemed incapable of shaving with any regularity. 

Jughead did not speak of him often, and when he did so it was usually in a poisonous tone that belied what Veronica imagined must be a truly contentious if not outright hateful relationship between father and son. 

And what business had the rough-tongued one-time sailor with the town’s premier citizens? 

Veronica lifted her eyes ever so cautiously over the brims of the barrels. 

“The book!” FP hissed. “You know I’m talking about the goddamned book, you son of a bitch!” 

Clifford seemed to take the insult in stride. 

“The book is taken care of,” he said, squaring his shoulders. 

“It ain’t the only copy in the world,” FP replied.

“As far as we’re concerned!” Penelope adjusted the trim of her fine coat. 

“And the dreams,” Clifford demanded. “Have they—“

“Yeah. Hell, yeah, they’ve started again. Same as before. Only worse.” 

Clifford swore. He directed a hectic glance over his shoulder, and Veronica secreted herself tight behind the row of barrels.

“Christ!” Clifford exclaimed. “Then it is on, again. Fine. Fine. You just…keep your damn nose clean as you can and stay on your toes. If anything needs doing I’ll send for you.” 

FP spit. “You never could clean up your own messes, you lot.” 

Clifford snorted. He took his wife’s arm and together they scuttled away from the docks.

“May the good Lord help us,” Clifford’s parting words.

FP laughed, hearty and loud.

“The good Lord doesn’t want anything more to do with you, Mr. Blossom.” 

Veronica wavered behind her cramped cover. FP dallied for a few minutes longer, smoking a quick cigarette, and watching the grey water with furtive and wary eyes. Then he too departed. 

Veronica emerged from behind the casks, and tried to make sense of what she had witnessed.

* * *

Jughead did not believe in mermaids. Notwithstanding that Betty and Veronica swore blind they’d been attacked by a swarm of such creatures just off of Hangman’s Reef. He knew Betty was not a liar—not habitually at least—he was less familiar with Veronica, but neither did she seem the type to invent such stories out of sheer boredom or malice. And even if she was, Betty would not go along with it.

So clearly the girls had seen _something_ , and perhaps even been attacked by that something. So then what sea creatures had been magnified by horror and imagination into mermen? 

A shark? Dolphins? Dolphins did sometimes sit and watch at the surface, as they’d described the creatures. So did seals.

Yet they’d told him the creatures had _hands_ , and that they had seen such a grisly, clawed appendage clear as could be by lamplight. If it was only Veronica, the city girl, concerned, he might believe she had mistaken the flipper of a seal for a hand in a fit of panic. But Betty was reared on these shores. She would know a seal if she saw one.

Jughead was familiar with no marine life that possessed _hands_. Not in these waters. The idea, quite frankly, gave him a little chill, absurd as it was. 

And then there was the little matter of Clifford and Penelope Blossom, and their clandestine early morning conversation. The exchange in which Clifford seemed to suggest allowing Keller to peg Cheryl as the guilty party in Jason’s murder. Which made little sense unless _they_ had orchestrated the slaying, whether they’d done the deed themselves or not. Just as Polly had said.

But that was nearly as fantastic as the fishmen. 

He could hardly imagine Clifford Blossom killing his son, cutting short his line, that pure and rushing blood valued above all else. Perhaps if a son were a dire disappointment, Jughead could believe drastic measures might be employed to safeguard the family’s integrity.

But Jason was no disappointment. He was intelligent, he’d been near graduation from Miskatonic with full honors when he died. He was brave, he was a war hero for God’s sakes! Clifford could not have asked a better son.

He sat at his favorite table at Pop’s little eatery, and realized he also had more immediate concerns. He did not think he should return to Thornhill tonight, after Cheryl had sent him away. Even if he was now worried for her safety in the house of her parents.

But that threw Jughead back into the perennial uncertainty he’d lived day to day before his engagement, wondering each night if he’d find a place to sleep. He supposed he could ask Pop if he’d permit to pass the night in the back. He would probably say yes. He turned towards the kitchen, and decided the next time the man emerged, he’d ask him.

But then the doors to the little place opened. In swept Veronica Lodge, moist with the fog. 

“There you are!” she said.

“You were…looking for me?” 

She sat down beside him. 

“I wanted to tell you something I thought you might like to know.”

“What’s that?”

She spared a fast and perfunctory look over her shoulder, as if she expected she was being followed.

“I saw your father talking with Clifford and Penelope Blossom earlier today. On the way back from the Register.”

Jughead raised his eyebrows with exaggerated intent. 

“Is that so?” 

“Yes.”

“And what would my father, the drunken layabout, have to discuss with the wealthiest man in town?”

“I was hoping you could answer that question for _me_ , my good literatus” Veronica said. “I thought it was odd myself, naturally.” 

She wasn’t lying. He could tell that much. Perhaps FP had simply been hired out to work on one of Clifford’s boats? That was perfectly plausible. 

“Maybe he’s doing a job for him? I don’t know.”

“It would be a weird job. Because the topic of conversation—whatever it was—was seriously odd.”

“Such as?” 

“Talking about a book and…bad dreams, I don’t know.”

He thought of his own nightmares, and the skin on the back of his neck prickled. Coincidence, surely. But—

“Where were they?” 

“At the wharf.” 

He narrowed his eyes. Goddamn the Blossoms. Goddamn his father.

“I guess I’d better talk to the man. Goddammit.”

* * *

It had been about a year since Jughead had last set foot in his father’s house. Truth be told, ‘house’ was an unduly grand designation for the ramshackle little hut built out of discarded wood and hammered together as much by sheer force of will as mallet and nail. 

If nothing else, the Jones clan exhibited a natural inclination towards craftsmanship, and they had since long before FP’s father sailed over from Pembrokeshire. That was the only way the little house might have held together so long, when it was composed of such inferior material. 

The house was even worse than Jughead remembered it. There were generous gaps between the wooden slats, and over the head of the doorframe, and had it not been for the darkness of the night and the volume of the fog, he would have been afforded an unobstructed view inside. 

Jughead could see where the wood had begun to soften, where rain-laced wind, winter sleet, and the simple toll of the crackling New England air had taken their grievous toll on the old boards and beams. He expected the house to fall any day now.

He knocked. Hard. He refused to believe his father was away. If he was away, then all the more shame to be heaped upon him, because these days FP had no respectable justification for quitting home. Jughead knocked away. 

A person shifted inside, and swayed and crashed against the feeble wall of the two room house. All the framework seemed to shake. Jughead stepped back.

The door opened.

FP Jones stood there. This time he truly completed the ‘miserable drunk’ ensemble as well as his budget would allow. Besides the opened shirt baring his broad chest, there was even a bottle of reeking whiskey squeezed tight in his left fist. Jughead stood up straight as he could manage, squared his slender shoulders, set his jaw. He thought he looked alright, dress-wise. Beneath his old coat he wore a pressed black waistcoat and a plain white shirt, gifted to him by the Blossoms. He wanted to look alright. Respectable. Great God, he wanted to look like _anything_ but the man before him.

Cheryl was an avid reader of the modern anthropologists and scientists of ‘eugenic betterment’. She spoke often of heredity, and how feeble-mindedness, violent disposition, and a penchant for drink could all be passed down through defective germ plasm. As she said, a man might be tutored by the brightest scholars on the earth, dressed in royal finery, and showered with sparkling jewels, but none of that could ever efface the black destiny written into every ganglion of his nerves and the length of his bones. Like a time bomb slumbering in the heart’s blood. 

His greatest nightmare. He would _not_ become his father. But what if he had no choice? What if it was, after all, a matter of the blood?

“Lo and behold,” FP laughed. “The prodigal son returns.”

“Briefly,” was Jughead’s sour reply. 

FP stepped aside and allowed his son’s entry. 

The inside of the house was as threadbare as without. There were two rooms, one built towards the forwards half of the shack which doubled as kitchen and living room, the rear serving as a bedroom. A few pairs of boots piled in the corner, and two revolvers (probably loaded) sat menacing on a table off to the side. 

“How can I help you, _dwt_?” FP asked, matching his son for dripping resentment. 

Jughead cringed at the employment of his old boyhood sobriquet. He scowled and moved past his father. In the corner, where the boots piled high, he suffered a vision of himself, ten years younger, curled up against the trembling walls in a pile of ill-smelling, lousy blankets. 

“Veronica tells me she saw you speaking with Clifford Blossom today. Is that so?” 

FP’s lackadaisical devil-may-care expression perished.

“Did she?” He snorted and brought the bottle of whiskey down upon the table with a resounding crash. Jughead watched the bottle for spiderweb fractures, and found none. 

“You’re not denying it.”

“I haven’t said ‘yes’, either!” 

“Don’t run me around in circles,” Jughead growled.

“Ah, now you’re all about the straight answers, eh? No getting poetic, literary today, eh?” 

“ _Cachau bant_!” Jughead swore. “Tell me what’s going on. I have reason to believe Clifford and Penelope Blossom might’ve been involved in the death of their son. And if you have any—“

FP’s eyes lightened with a melancholy pain, a true and human hurt. 

“You think your father’s a killer?” 

Jughead hardly knew what he ought to think. He did not know what his father would decline to transgress, if anything. But the guilt for what he’d said was present, even if weak. 

“I don't know," said Jughead. “Help me.” 

FP picked up his bottle of whiskey. He took another swig. 

"I can't help you.” 

Jughead sneered, disgust a hot and furious cauldron in his chest. 

“You never could.” Jughead aimed for the open door. “You never could, and how could you? You can hardly help yourself. Christ, I had to go to the Blossoms to live like a man and not a goddamned rat!” He went for the door. 

FP intercepted him, and sealed the door tight ahead of his boy. Perhaps it had been the final infusion of alcohol that tipped the balance, or perhaps the sheer shame of his son's explosive denunciation. Something shifted in the steely old-world gaze. 

“Sit down then, _dwt._ ” 

Jughead caught his lip in a cold snarl. And he sat. 

“You want to hear a story?” FP demanded. “Eh?” 

“A story?" he scoffed. 

“You want to know about the _Selkie_. You want to know about that trip? You always told me that voyage made you hate me.” FP’s lips curled together, and his eyes heated with tears. “If you’re going to hate me you orter know why you do.” 

“Fine,” Jughead acceded, hardly able to bottle his own fury and discomfort. “Let’s hear it."

* * *

It was in the early Summer of 1915, when the wind was hot and dry over the clear Atlantic, that FP Jones made the very worst decision he ever would. 

He did not like Clifford Blossom. Even if the man himself was not a petty tyrant with an open and withering contempt towards all who were not Anglo-Saxon purebreds of high and particular stock, and who seemed to have no conception of morality beyond the old natural maxim that might was right, FP maintained an instinctive dislike for the wealthy. It was one of the few principles he’d inherited from his brutish despot of a father, and carried over from Wales. The English and the men of means: to hell with them. 

Oftentimes he was hired out to work on one of Blossom’s boats, and he would haul into shore pounds of fish, and turn over the great bulk of _his_ catch to the man who did absolutely nothing save claim ownership of the vessel used to procure such a bounty. 

Unbearable.

So when he got word that Blossom was the ordering force behind the impending voyage of the _Selkie_ , FP was struck with a deep suspicion. 

The _Selkie_ was a 350 foot long steamer, a good sight larger than anything that docked in a little hamlet such as Riverdale under ordinary circumstances. However, owing to its diminished but once great importance in the age of sail, Riverdale boasted a wharf far out of proportion to its modest dimensions. The _Selkie_ had idled at the docks for about two weeks now, after having steamed north from Jamaica Bay, already half-laden with its crew for the coming journey. 

The answer to the question of why such a monstrous vessel wasted a day at all in a nautical irrelevancy like Riverdale came with the regular, punctual visits of Mr. Blossom to the dock. In the course of these visits he inspected the ship with great interest, strolled up and down its decks as if he were certifying every nut and bolt in the hull’s composition, and engaged in animated conversation with the _Selkie’_ s captain, a tall Nantucket Yankee called Vaughan. 

FP was only a month returned from a six month voyage round the horn of Africa and back, and had expected perhaps a few months of quiet, working on fisherman’s boats again or mending nets. But the arrival of the _Selkie_ seemed portentous. He watched the ship each day as he came to the wharf, listing softly in the misty water, peopled by its leering, mysterious crew.

Or in fact, the crew seemed divided into two factions. There was one party that appeared ordinary enough, albeit especially cosmopolitan, even for sailors. FP noted alongside Americans, there were Irishmen, Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, Indians, Malays, Arabs, even a handful of Japanese and Abyssinians. Again, these gave the impression of unremarkable seamen, the type he’d encountered a thousand and one times in all the ports of the earth. 

But the men composing the rest of the crew, the smaller part, perhaps less than a third, were odd sorts. They were, with regards to racial and national origin, as varied as their compatriots. But they did not strike FP as common sailors. Unlike the others, they were never spied up in the rigging, or swabbing the decks, or doing much at all besides lolling about amidships, leering crudely into the sea or at the fellows on the docks. The other sailors pointedly avoided them. FP decided there was something queer in the construction of their faces—nothing of hereditary deformity, as it appeared. Rather, the closest approximation he could offer himself to convey the disturbing quality in their appearance was that of degraded clay. It was as if they had been rotten or corrupted somehow.

Needless to say, the whole ship and its eerie crew festered with such seething evil that when Captain Vaughan came ashore and revealed he needed some five more hands to crew his ship, and asked which of Riverdale’s seafaring men would like the opportunity, FP decided he was not among them. 

But then one evening, a week before the _Selkie_ was set to sail for Bogota and thence southwards and round Tierra del Fuego into the Pacific, Clifford Blossom came down to the docks again.

FP sat mending a net, chewed through by sharks the night before. The mist curled round him and soaked the tips of his calloused fingers as they worked. 

Blossom stood over him, and the shadow covered FP and then continued out onto the thrashing sea.

“I hear you’re not interested in crewing the _Selkie_.” 

“Why don’t you crew it, highness?” FP laughed. “The weather might do you good.”

Clifford chuckled.

“I’m having trouble finding enough men to fill out the ship’s complement.” 

“Keep looking.” 

“How would you like to earn yourself $800?” 

FP laughed dryly at what was surely a poor joke. 

“For a six month voyage?” 

“Indeed.” 

“I don't think so.” 

“I do.” Clifford held his tongue for a moment. “You’ve got a son, don’t you? In that miserable little cottage of yours. Why the hell do you people come to this country if not for something better? Opportunity?” 

FP did have a son. He knew his relationship with Jughead was contentious at best. He drank too much. He knew that. He had always promised himself that he would not become his father. And he had never raised a hand to his boy, but he had done nearly everything short of it. Frittered away a month’s wages on whiskey or cigarettes, and left both of them with empty stomachs. How many nights had Jughead elected to spend with the Andrews family, because he could not bear his father’s bouts of drunken fury and insomnolence? FP hardly saw his boy grow up. How could he, when his weeks and his months were passed away in the foaming Atlantic, the churning Pacific? 

“$800?” 

“Hand to the gods,” Clifford said. 

FP didn’t think he’d outright lie. Not when he knew that if he cheated him, FP would come back to Riverdale in a few months’ time and strangle him with his own fine silk sheets. 

“Really?” 

“Yes. I really need the men. And I hear you’re a good sailor. I _know_ it.”

“Why do you need the men so bad? What’s five or ten less going to cost you?”

“Not what it’s going to cost _me_.”

“You ever give straight answers?”

“I’ve got another offer.” He held off for a moment, presumably to build anticipation. “What if I sent your boy to university? He’s a bright lad, isn’t he? I’m sure he would do well, so long as he could get his foot into the door. I’ve got friends who could pull a string or two at Miskatonic.” 

FP froze up. He had long agonized over the future of his young son. FP and his mother had come over from Pembrokeshire on the Welsh coast when he was eleven years old, once his iron-handed father had died at last and liberated them. Gwen Jones took ill and perished at the midpoint of the passage, and he spend his adolescence in and out of workhouses, the brigs of steamships, steel mills. He would die a toiling Welshman. But his son was bright. His son was sensitive and capable. His son was a true-born American, and he deserved the opportunity to make something of his talents. For all the distance and disconnect between them, FP did not know if Jughead still loved him, and if he did not, he probably deserved it. FP had always sworn to himself he would never become his father. And no, no, he had never raised a hand to his son. But he always feared in the profundities of his soul that his father’s spirit slumbered in his, that his father’s dire cruelty was writ into his heart’s blood. That it _was_ a matter of the blood, and in the end he would have no choice but to become such a man. 

But if Blossom told the truth, if he was really willing to do such a thing, and God knew it was within his means. Then FP would give his boy the greatest gift he ever could. An education. A light in the darkness. He deserved that. And FP might be free forever from the terrible dread that he would be his father in the end.

Blossom swore blind he told the truth. And at last, FP agreed, once it was made clear that should Clifford try to welch on the deal or cheat him in any way, he would die for it. And this was no hyperbole. 

“One more thing,” Clifford said. “You could captain a ship, no? If need arose?”

“If need arose,” FP said.

“Good.”

The day before his departure, FP went to see Freddy Andrews. Andrews was a good man, the first friend he’d ever made in Riverdale. 

FP had come to the little town for the first time when he was fifteen. Firebrand that he’d been, he’d found himself in a four-on-one round of fisticuffs after a number of fellows at the docks mocked his then-poor English. Fred, then the son of the town’s only carpenter, had come along and saved him from ignominious defeat. 

“Looks like you’re bleeding,” said Fred, helping the dark young stranger to his feet.

“Know I this,” FP wiped the blood from his lips. 

“You not from here?”

“No.” 

“Where you from?” 

“Cymru. Country far, yeah?” 

“Are you English?” 

FP squared up, straightened his shoulders. Wiped away more blood. 

“Call you me—call me Englishman, I—I kill you, understand?” 

Fred raised his hands.

“Hey, I don’t mean disrespect.” He extended his hand. “Frederick Andrews. Fred or Freddy is good.” 

“Forsythe Pendleton Jones.”

“Hell of a name. Welcome to Riverdale.” 

They became fast companions. Fred helped him hone his English, and was no small part of the reason FP decided to make a home for himself in Riverdale. Now, on the eve of his embarking with the _Selkie_ , he had a deep sense of premonition, and he felt he should speak to someone. And with his wife and daughter already gone, and not wishing to burden his young son, he could think of no one else. Even if he and Fred had not spoken for some time, with his friend citing FP’s incorrigible and increasingly intolerable manner. 

“FP,” Fred watched his old friend through bleary eyes. “What’s the matter?” 

“No matter,” FP stepped into the respectable kitchen of the Andrews house. Archie, fifteen and lanky, passed by in the background.

“Hey, Mr. Jones.”

“Hey, Archie.” Then to Fred: “No matter.” He told him of Clifford Blossom’s deal, of the eerie ship on which he was set to sail. “Listen—Blossom told me I crew his damn ship, and he would send my boy to school at Miskatonic. Anything happens to me. Anything at all—you make sure that son of a bitch makes good on his promise.” 

Fred watched him, awed.

“Sure thing. Of course I will.” 

“Something wrong with that ship. You know I don’t go in for ghosts or sea monsters—any of that nonsense. But I swear, something’s off with that ship.”

“You’ll be fine, old man.” 

“We’ll find out.”

Fred embraced him.

The next morning, FP left a brief note for Jughead, who was still fast asleep. It said only he was bound for the South Pacific, and would not be back for some time.

He boarded the _Selkie_ , and some hours before sunrise, it unmoored from the docks and set out into the vast Atlantic. 

Within two days of the journey, FP found relations between the two divisions of the crew were even worse than he’d first suspected. 

As was explained to him by Vicente Rodriguez, a tall Mexican from Yucatan, the smaller part of the crew, the oddities whose faces inspired such revulsion, were entirely mysterious beings of whom the rest of the sailors knew nothing. They had taken to calling them ‘the cultists’, after Donovan the Irishman swore he’d seen a handful of them huddled on deck in the midst of a furious storm near the Azores offering strange and indecipherable prayers up to the twisting skies, while the rest of the seamen huddled in the brig or struggled to keep the engines puffing. 

The cultists kept themselves apart from the remainder of the crewmen, and even the captain seemed afraid of them. Yet it became clear they were the masters of the voyage. Their evident head, a stocky Lett whose name no one knew, could be seen often conferring with Captain Vaughan, exchanges that invariably ended with Vaughan’s pale-faced acquiescence. 

These were Blossom’s men, FP supposed. 

The ship’s first stop was in La Guaira, Venezuela. FP watched, beneath a pulsing Caribbean sun and over the glassy blue water, while a new knot of strange men came aboard carrying a nondescript wooden crate, and quickly set themselves apart with the cultists. 

“Not good,” said Malik, an Arab from Haifa. “No, not good.” He muttered something less than encouraging in Arabic, and spit into the sea.

The _Selkie_ steamed southwards, hugging the Brazilian coast. So heterogenous was the crew that it began to practically impede performance of duty. English and French became the linguas franca of the ship, but even this was not really enough. The two Japanese fellows, for example, could communicate with their comrades only through two intermediaries, a Burmese who spoke a bit of Japanese and an Englishmen who spoke a bit of Burmese. There were similar problems with a trio of Persians and a few Senegalese. 

Some began to mutter that this division and consequent weakening of the crew was by design. 

The cultists on the other hand, were united to such an eerie extent that sometimes they seemed more like appendages of some greater mind than sovereign beings. Despite a diversity of forms and races as wide as the rest of the sailors, they moved, acted, and spoke as one. 

“No one knows where we’re going,” said Donovan. “Or why. We ain’t picked up nothing worth anything, yet.” 

Off of the Argentine coast, FP found himself finishing a shift in the boiler rooms below deck. He trudged back into the air and sun, and paused only when he noticed two of the cultists secreted away near a boiler, engaged in some conspiratorial discourse. As they hailed from so many varied nations, it was rare he could understand anything they said. But by luck, these two spoke in English. 

“Are the stars quite right?” hissed one of them. 

“Close enough. That is what Blossom said,” replied his companion. “Time is short. That is what Blossom told me in his charts.”

“Will Vaughan do as he’s charged?”

“If not, we’ve got the other man.”

FP remembered Clifford asking if he could captain a ship if need be. He shuddered.

The _Selkie_ rounded Tierra del Fuego and soared into the Pacific. 

That was when it happened. 

The big Lett who headed the cultists confronted Captain Vaughan on the aft deck, in sight of all the crew. Vaughan, it seemed had been under the impression that he was to sail for Sydney. But no, said the Lett.

“You will take us to these coordinates.” 

“It’s the middle of the god-damned ocean,” Vaughan spat.

“You will take us there.”

The cultists crowded round their leader and the stricken captain, leering, some throwing back their coats to reveal gleaming knives or pistols stuck in their belts.

“I will not!” Vaughan insisted.

Rodriguez stepped forward. 

“Enough of all of this! Who are you?” He jabbed an accusatory finger at the cultists. “We want to know who you men are! We won’t sail another mile until we’ve learned everything!” The sailors quick rallied behind him, shouting and clamoring, desperate to that the obscure adventure be justified. 

Vaughan, steeled by the support of the greater part of the crew, was resolute in his determination to continue for Sydney. 

So in full view of some hundred and twenty souls, the cultists included, the Lett drew a Russian revolver and fired it through Vaughan’s head. Vaughan reeled, skull ruptured, blood pouring down over his white shirt. The Lett gave him a short, sharp shove, and he tumbled over the gunwale, disappearing into the swirling froth behind the _Selkie_. 

Rodriguez and some twenty braver souls rushed the cultists. Then stopped short when the Lett gave a howling order and the cultists produced a heretofore concealed arsenal of weaponry, ranging from rifles to pistols to ancient sabers. This was a merchant ship. Few of the other men were armed. 

FP stumbled back. 

Until one of the cultists confronted him and rammed the barrel of a rifle into his chest. He smiled wickedly. 

“You are captain, and pilot now.” 

So this was why Clifford had demanded his part in the voyage. 

He had never captained a ship before, but he was familiar with the workings of watercraft, he could serve as pilot, and he had administered sailors beneath him many times before. If he were braver, he might have refused. But at stake was not only his life but all the rest of the crew as well. And somewhere, FP still hoped Blossom might make good on his promises. 

The _Selkie_ continued towards its new and occulted destination with the crew working as bondsmen in an old slave galley, under the guns and fatal watch of the cultists. Once, one of the Senegalese spat an insolent word at one of the gunmen, and received a bullet through the chest for it. There was not so much backtalk after that. 

Even had it not been for the onerous linguistic constraints and barriers, it was impossible for the crew to conspire against their captors, for there was hardly a moment when they were free from armed supervision. 

The cultists marked out on their nautical charts where they wished FP to take them. It was indeed, as Vaughan had said, a nondescript point in the midst of blank and unbroken waters for hundreds of miles in every cardinal direction. A blank space lost somewhere in the wastes between Chile and New Zealand.

“What is there?” he asked, as a gang of cultists crowded round him, pistols readied.

The Lett watched him through hot, brutish eyes.

“ _R’lyeh_ ,” he hissed. 

And he would say no more.

The well-founded rumor began to spread among the sailors, as quickly as their guarded whisperings could carry it, that they would live only until they reached their destination, upon which the cultists would dispose of them all. 

This was not helped when the crate acquired in Carácas was wheeled out onto the deck one night. The cultists pried it open, and revealed to the crew a truly monstrous Idol hewn out of some hideous green stone. It was about four feet tall, depicting an ugly squat creature, vaguely humanoid, with a dozen eyes and a face thick with dangling tentacles. A pair of atrophied wings hung at its back, dipping to the hooked talons that sprang from each curling toe. 

It was truly revolting, more so because the stone was so _odd_ , both smooth and porous, and seeming to defy the limits of human craftsmanship in its repulsive finesse. 

The cultists set it in the center of the aft deck, and in the night they built fires before it, danced round it in mad ecstasy, chanting in some tongue no man among the _Selkie_ ’s cosmopolitan crew could comprehend.

These chants struck the ear as more incomprehensible, guileless gibbering than any coherent speech. It recalled, in FP’s mind, a child aping pathetically the language of his parents, but constrained to pale imitation by cognitive and verbal inability. But there was a certain string of eldritch words repeated often and heartily enough that every sailor soon learned them by heart. 

“ _Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nahf Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”_ And then a moment’s break, and the cultists threw their hands towards heaven again, and cried: “ _Iä! Iä! Yog-Sothoth, iä! Yog-Sothoth, iä_!” 

The motley collection of rough and saucy sailors soon became devout as a convent, confronted with such sheer deviltry. The brig and the decks were ever-full with appeals to Jehovah, to Christ, to Allah, to the great god Krishna. 

FP still did not pray.

One night the cultists came and dragged away Donovan, the Irishman. Even as he fought and screamed, they hauled him before their woeful image and opened his throat, so that his blood rippled over the deck and down into the sea.

“ _Santa Maria_!” Rodriguez exclaimed.

Two nights later they did the same with one of the Greeks.

And now FP realized why Blossom had made such lofty promises—Clifford had never intended that his ersatz captain should return from this voyage at all. He wondered if the other men had been promised similar boons. 

What could they do? They had no arms to fight back. 

Within three weeks, the cultists had slain near twenty sailors, and the crew dwindled precariously. 

The seas grew violent and torrid as they neared their destination. Glassy blue ocean turned to lashing, twisting grey storm swells, sheets of freezing water thrown high into the wind to catch the torrents of rain as they fell. 

FP had abandoned the wheelhouse and taken to the deck, where he issued desperate instructions to seamen rushing to and fro across the forward deck tying down what wasn’t and securing what was. The ship tossed and dipped in the troughs of furious, towering waves, and the twin howls of wind and sea drowned out all but the highest screams and the voice right against the ear.

One of the Japanese men, a fellow named Hikori, sidled up to him, under the pretense of asking orders. Instead, he said, in painfully shattered English and over the whipping wind: “we have made plan. Many of us. Need you. When you in wheelhouse, you turn the ship hard. All cultists lose balance. Give us a chance to grab weapons.” 

FP listened. It was hardly a great scheme. But there was hardly a superior alternative. 

One of the cultists stood twenty feet away, feet planted on the sopping deck, a rifle in his hands. 

He watched them intently. But he could not have heard.

Some days later, as FP stood in the wheelhouse, Malik came to ostensibly give the results of sounding. Two cultists stood guard on either flank of the _Selkie_ ’s captive captain. 

“How deep?” asked FP.

“725 fathoms,” said Malik. There was a brief but deep pause between the ‘7’ and the ’25’. 7:25. That was the time that he ought to spin the wheel hard. He nodded. 

His two wardens were none the wiser.

That night, they sailed into another storm. As the ship tossed on the swells, FP watched the clock intently. So did every sailor able to do the same. His two guards had taken to talking in a low, guttural tongue. 

A wave washed over the aft deck.

7:25.

FP yanked the wheel to the right hard as he could. The great ship groaned and rolled hard, already unstable upon the flowing ocean. 

The two cultists slipped and tumbled into one another with shouts of fury. On the deck below, sailors and cultists alike went flying, smashing into guard rails and barrels, and FP watched three men topple over the gunwales and into the churning water. He hoped to God they were not among his rebels. 

The ship listed, balancing precariously on its axis. 

FP leapt from the wheel as the two cultists struggled to regain their wits. He snatched away the nearest man’s rifle, turned it round, and fired a single round through the man’s face. The rear of his skull burst open and the diffusion of blood washed over his companion’s face. The second man issued forth a howl of anger and sprang. FP cracked him over the skull with the rifle’s stock and then shot him, too.

He rushed from the wheelhouse to find every inch of the _Selkie_ now served as stage for a great battle, fierce as any pirates’ raid in the days of sail. 

The ship’s unexpected roll had caught the cultists off guard, but the sailors had been prepared. Many had already relieved their captors of rifles or revolvers. And the sailors enjoyed a numerical advantage, indispensable in the sphere of martial contest. 

The aft deck descended into a melee of brutal hand to hand, as men smashed the skulls of their foes against the rails, skewered opponents through with boathooks, closed their creased hands round throats and pressed tight. The storm whipped round them, washing the fray in billowing sheets of foaming water and stinging rain. 

FP balanced his rifle across a row of casks and shot down one of the leering cultists as he advanced on an Italian seaman with a knife. 

Rodriguez, the big Mexican, laid a heavy iron pole into one of the cultists’ heads. 

In the space of a half hour, the battle was won. The cultists lay dead, dying, or surrendered. 

They had fought with a stunning, almost superhuman ferocity, and the victorious sailors sustained grievous casualties of their own. Discounting the cultists, owing to the sacrifices, the battle, and even the mundane illnesses of voyaging by sea, the ship’s crew had shrunken to some thirty-five men, barely enough to maintain a great steamer such as this one. 

As the storm passed, the seamen dragged the big Lett, who was chief of the cultists, into the wheelhouse. The Lett had sustained a bullet wound to the thigh in the course of the struggle, and it was causing him great discomfort. Not that the sailors were particularly concerned with his comfort.

“You’ll speak now,” hissed Rodriguez. “Who are you? What is the idol? What is the purpose of this voyage?” 

“That is god!” laughed the Lett. 

FP pressed his boot to the man’s bullet wound, and he howled.

“Speak sense!” FP demanded.

“That is the Great Cthulhu,” the Lett said with a leering grin. “The sleeper of R’lyeh.” 

FP recognized both the words from the cultists’ ceaseless chants of worship. 

“That chant. That chant, what does it mean?” 

When no immediate response was forthcoming, Hikori pressed a revolver to the man’s head.

“ _Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nahf Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!_ ” laughed the Lett, eyes rolling in his head. “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming!” 

“ _Who is Cthulhu_?” 

“He is the priest of the gods. Of the Great Old Ones who ruled the earth before men, and who will rule it again.” 

“The Great Old Ones?”

After some prodding, in the form of pistols, grim threats, and purposeful irritation of his bullet-torn thigh, the Lett gave a full if brief account of his loathsome faith.

They worshipped these ‘Great Old Ones’, invidious, formless things that climbed down from the stars in aeons past, when the earth was barren, before the first inklings of organic life crept from the muck. 

The Old Ones were a half-immaterial race, and when the stars aligned properly they could leap through the inky chasms of space, slithering from world to world. But when the stars fell out of order, they could not really live. And yet, they could not really die. But they slept. 

They slept now, in the earth, or in the seas, or even among the stars. But one day they would awaken, and they would shatter all systems of rusting law, of vacuous morals and hollow philosophies. There would be no more good nor evil then, only the raw power of the Old Ones, who would rule forever and fix all the earth in the murky void between life and death. 

Cthulhu, who dreamt in the sunken city of R’lyeh, would be the first to awaken, and as high priest of the Old Ones, would raise the rest of his race from the primordial slumber.

The Lett would not say as much in so many words, but it seemed the sacrifice of their companions was meant to ease if not affect his awakening. 

And the cultists? Demanded the sailors. What was their reward?

“We will serve as the priests of the Old Ones,” said the Lett. “Between life and death. Forever and ever.”

And the rest of man?

“They will _serve_.” 

A conference was held, and the surviving cultists locked away in the brig. 

Many were in favor of making for Sydney harbor, where hopefully these madmen might be remanded into the custody of some authority. 

There was a heavy doubt that what crew existed would be enough to complete the journey, as they hovered now somewhere between Auckland and the Chilean coast, in the deepest stretch of the Pacific. And few trusted the cultists, even under armed guard, to be employed as extra hands on deck.

There was another option.

The point on the map indicated by the Lett. 

This mystical sunken city of ‘R’lyeh’.

It did not exist, of course. All agreed to that. These men were not in possession of their faculties, given over to some collective mania. 

But perhaps there really was _something_ there. Some island. Even if they could not refuel there or contact help (for the _Selkie_ ’s radiotelegraphs had been long disabled by the cultists), what if these worshippers had a stronghold of some kind? Pens full of further victims awaiting the sacrificial knife? Did they not have a humane duty to investigate? And again, perhaps there _would_ be fuel there, or some way to beg a rescue. 

In the end, it was this motion that carried. So the _Selkie_ with its trimmed down crew and hold filled to bursting with prisoners, continued on its course to R’lyeh. 

As they sailed, FP’s mind tended towards the disturbing. How could it not? He could accept that some number of seamen had been drawn into this senseless rite. Except that this voyage had been Clifford Blossom’s initiative. And Clifford Blossom had pressed _him_ to go along. Blossom prided himself on being a ‘man of science’, an intellectual. If he believed the same as these men, what if—

If nothing else, the promise of ruling forever alongside a race of ancient heathen gods would doubtless hold boundless appeal for the ever-avaricious Blossom clan. 

They sailed for a week more, and even in the face of their victory over the cultists, the general mood of the surviving crewmen worsened markedly. Sailors began to complain of awful nightmares that dogged them through the evening and left them weary wrecks come daylight. Dreams of greasy green walls of stone and sliming, vile things that swam in the black gulfs between time and space. 

The cultists, even bound, would not cease their hideous worship, and all hours of the night the ship rang with that disgusting song. 

“ _Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nahf Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Iä Yog-Sothoth!”_

While they could be coaxed to speak of great Cthulhu, any attempt to inquire as to the nature of this mist-shrouded ‘Yog-Sothoth’ was met with steely silence. 

When FP finally made the decision to toss the hellish idol of Cthulhu overboard (to the yowls and howling of the cultists), many of the sailors swore they saw the ocean pulse with green light as it sank down. 

On the seventh day of the week, land was sighted.

Apparently.

It was an island, unmarked by any chart that could be hunted down through the ship. But precisely where the cultists had indicated R’lyeh would be. 

As the _Selkie_ neared shore, it became evident enough this was no mundane south seas island. No sand nor foliage could be spied from the deck, only strange and alien spires of some green-black stone, divided by broad dark thoroughfares whose courses and angles made no sense at all. It appeared indeed to be the highest peak of some ancient and derelict city, jutting up from the waves after centuries of submersion. 

Upon spying what none wished to admit was R’lyeh, many of the sailors, those who had been stricken worst by the nightmares, went nearly mad. They wailed and shouted, declaring that all was finished and man’s curtain was set to fall. Some fell to the deck like children, crying and begging mercy from gods who would not listen. In the end, some ten men had to be secured with the cultists, for their own welfare as much as for that of the others.

This left only some twenty-five effectives. 

The _Selkie_ anchored off the city, in some twenty fathoms of water. 

FP formed a party of eleven men, himself included. They would go ashore in hopes of finding anyone who might aid them, or if need be, of _rescuing_ any soul that might require it. They availed themselves of a few of the cultists’ weapons, and in a skiff approached the black mass of devilish rock.

As his boot touched the first sloping length of dripping green stone, FP experienced a concurrent blast of animal terror that nearly impelled him to leap back into the boat and rush away. But there were ten men at his back who trusted in him. So he forged onwards.

The further exploration of R’lyeh served only to prove initial impressions from the deck of the _Selkie_ had been accurate. The city truly flaunted all human sense and the regulating dictates of euclidean geometry. 

The buildings, if these great black monoliths streaked with primordial ooze and scratched deep with bewildering hieroglyphs could be called such, lacked rupture or division, and so implied construction from a single block of immense stone. But that was madness, of course.

FP clutched his revolver tight, and noticed his comrades doing the same with their weapons. He felt they would have treated any object brought from the ship in identical fashion. For it was not the fact that their arms were _arms_ , it was that they were objects of banal mundanity and sense and _normalcy_ in this grand, dribbling madhouse. 

They would follow an avenue promising to lead them to higher ground, and then find somehow they had instead traveled downhill. 

The sailors made wide loops to avoid convex angles, only to discover in raw wonder that somehow, they had become concave.

Even the shadows cast by the hideous necropolis defied expectations. They did not fall right. They were more entities unto themselves than they were aspects of their corporeal twins. 

“ _Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo_ ,” Rodriguez began to pray. “ _Santificado sea tu nombre, venga tu reino.”_

FP spoke no Spanish, but he recognized the cadence of the prayer.

 _Thy kingdom come_.

“Hello?” FP called. “Hello?” his voice bounded weakly through the great city, and then vanished into the thick green miasma that pervaded the air. Nothing. 

“Back to the ship,” said one of the Greek sailors. “Back to the ship.”

“Not yet!” hissed FP.

They rounded another corner. 

The Greek screamed. All heads turned to the sound. And he was gone. The men raised rifles, directed by animal instinct. But he was gone. He was in their midst, and then he was gone. There were no crevices in the singular roadway, no snares or laid traps. He had simply been swallowed by the city. 

One of the sailors went mad and discharged his rifle into the wastes of R’lyeh without aim or purpose. The bullets whirled into oblivion. 

And then the men came to see they were standing upon a great vault. Hundreds of meters wide, a mighty two-pieced gateway carved from the same tenebrous eldritch marble as all else in the city. 

They crept meekly along the horizontal plane, avoiding the point of junction where the behemoth doors would split open should ever there be a force enough to compel such weighty constructs to move. 

And then the plane was not horizontal. And somehow, they stood flat on the height of a vertical doorway, like spiders upon a wall. 

Someone screamed, and justifiably so. He dropped his rifle and it tumbled down into the grim angles and spires of R’lyeh. 

And then the door creaked open. 

The sailors were thrown from their insectoid suspension and tumbled back to the slimy Stygian rock. Above them, the ponderous portal gave way. The hideous Immensity forced its oozing, serpentine bulk through the aged vault and again into the light of the sun unseen for aeons. 

A handful of men looked directly upon Great Cthulhu as He roused from the primordial slumber. Their minds snapped. The weapons, if they still held them, fell from their hands. They could only gibber and howl as the blasphemous Starspawn consumed them and all they had ever been or might be.

FP dragged Rodriguez to his feet. He would not fix the Thing with his gaze. He registered only shattered pieces of Its impossible, gruesome entirety. The mottled bubbling green, the writhing tentacles, the wicked claws and phalanx of glittering eyes. 

What remained of the party rushed madly through the spiraling ways of R’lyeh, navigating accursed bends that were not bends and wild apertures that closed as they opened. 

In their wake lumbered the colossal Titan liberated from His abyssal prison. 

By some transient grace, they found their skiff and rowed with insane vigor for the _Selkie_ rolling offshore in the crashing grey surf. 

When they were hoisted aboard again, the sailors on deck were already whipped into an insane excitement by the risen Thing, clearly visible from the ship, should a man be foolish enough to look. 

Another two fell into madness. The others, by luck or by terror, would not gaze upon Great Cthulhu in all His squalid glory. 

Thank God, the engines had been left idling. 

“Full steam ahead!” shrieked one of the Portuguese sailors. “ _Meu Deus_!” 

FP rushed to the wheelhouse and with straining muscles and mind turned the ship hard from that black, lightless shore. He fought to stay the demolition of his mind and sense for he could feel they were on the verge of fragmentation. It was akin to desperately trying to hold together a shattered water jug, even as the contents seeped from the fissures and one slip of the finger would send the whole thing to pieces. Oh, God, it was _slipping_.

The cultists in the brig howled and screeched in terrible ecstasy before their god.

And FP remembered what the Lett had said. That Great Cthulhu was only the _priest_ of the Great Old Ones. That He would awaken his fellows and they would be restored to their primal kingship over the earth. And the mournful death knell of man would thus be sounded. He would be reduced to a broken slave caste beneath the eternal heel of the Old Ones.

He thought of Jughead, his young son at home, lanky and dreamy and just growing into manhood. The boy liked to write, to hoard pocket change so that he could buttress his growing collection with tattered old novels and books of poetry to read. He was nothing like his father, thank God. And with time, FP knew his son could become a better man than he or his own father had ever been.

But not if this _Thing_ was allowed to awaken.

He clambered from the wheelhouse as the ship chugged away from R’lyeh.

“Listen to me!” he called out to the ‘crew’, of which only some fifteen remained sound enough of body and mind to be any use. “You remember what the Lett said? This—this Cthulhu…he’s going to wake up the rest of them. The rest of his _kind_! You have wives, children, don’t you? Families? What’s the sense in fleeing? Where are we going to run to?”

The sailors looked to one another, as if one might provide a refutation of that stark and grisly truth.

“What do we do?” demanded a man. “This is not a warship! We’ve got no armaments! No cannon!” 

In the water beyond, Cthulhu sank beneath the frothing waves, and became a churning wake surging towards them. 

“We can ram him,” FP said, and nearly howled with laughter at his own insane design. But all was mad, now. 

Someone scoffed. 

“We’ll all be killed.”

For a miserable moment, the sailors pondered that grim reality. 

“And if we aren’t?” Rodriguez said finally. “Then we goddamn the rest of the world.”

“The boilers,” said Hikori with a sudden light of genius in his eyes. “Boilers. We load boilers. We hit it. Boilers explode. Engine explodes.” 

“And send him back to the bottom,” finished a Frenchman. 

“And ourselves with him?” demanded the first objector. 

“And ourselves with him,” FP affirmed in bold resignation. It could not have been any other way. 

To his shock, there were no dissenters when the slapdash plan was finalized. Hikori, two Senegalese, and the Frenchmen rushed below decks to sabotage the boilers. FP rushed back into the wheelhouse, and with a straining turn, spun the _Selkie_ back around. 

Rodriguez kissed a little wooden crucifix. 

The sky overhead darkened. Black storm clouds obscured the heavens beyond. Flashes of lightning fell into the sea.

Hikori and his comrades dropped the water levels in the boilers precipitously. 

FP directed the bowsprit of the ship dead on for the heart of their titanic, alien Foe. He kept his head low as the ship surged forward, and Great Cthulhu slithered to meet them. He would not look into the Thing’s cruel, writhing face. He would keep his mind to the last.

The sea churned round the two foes. 

He estimated impact at thirty seconds. 

FP said the first prayer he’d ever said since he was eleven years old, watching his mother die on the ship from Wales. 

The steamer crashed into the black-green, inconsistent abomination. The boilers exploded. A rash of consequent ignitions from the failing engine tore open the _Selkie’s_ flank. Cthulhu’s disgusting, roiling masses of discolored bulk divided around the piercing bow of the ship. The explosions set what remained alight.

The force of the blast hoisted FP up from the ground and propelled him into the wall of the wheelhouse. Water poured in through a shattered bridge window. The last thing he saw before the darkness enveloped him was that the gelatinous, hateful Thing was already recombining.


	5. the burial of Jason Blossom

“Good God, I don’t know. But I managed to swim out of the wheelhouse as the ship went down,” FP moaned. “Pulled myself on a length of wood. Two others were left. One of the Senegalese and a Portuguese sailor.” He laughed, wheezing, cold laughter. “A British steamer picked us up two days later. Carried us into Sydney. It was four months before I could even talk. I don’t remember much of that. Just the goddamned  _ nightmares _ . Another four months before I could get on my feet again. That’s when I came home. I don’t know if we—we didn’t kill him, I know that,” FP laughed again. “No. Maybe we stunned him. Or maybe we just annoyed him bad enough he went back to sleep. Like you wake up and decide the morning ain’t worth it.” More laughter.

Jughead watched his father in undivided awe. He did not want to lend credence to a word of the ludicrous tale. He would have liked to call his father a drunken liar, who could not gather his wits even when a murder was in play, and who preferred to craft lunatic fairy stories rather than treat his son with manful respect for even one goddamned moment.

But the city. 

_ R’lyeh.  _

The bleak, black metropole of Jughead’s dreams. 

The oozing primordial walls buried beneath blasphemous hieroglyphs whose angles refused to cohere and whose foundation was not in this world, and the great and hideous bulk that stalked the derelict corpse city. 

_ Great Cthulhu _ .

No. No. This was not so. Could not be so. There was no ‘Great Cthulhu’. There were no goddamned fish people. 

Before he could answer his father in any way, FP launched back into his tale.

“But, see, it was  _ Clifford Blossom  _ that sent us on that damned trip. This—this cult, they must have groups all over the world. Like denominations or...or sects something. There were fellas from every nation on the  _ Selkie _ . But it was  _ Blossom _ sent us. See, that Lett on the ship told me they believed when thIs Cthulhu awoke, all the worshippers would get to rule  _ with  _ him.  _ That’s  _ what that crazy son of a bitch Blossom wanted. What he  _ wants _ , probably. To be some kind of god.”

“So then what were you talking with Clifford about today at the docks, huh? Just reminiscing about old times and heathen gods?”

“When I came home finally, I went to find him. I was gonna kill the bastard, I swear. He pretended I was crazy, of course. Wouldn’t say anything. But the old lady Blossom—Rose Blossom, she’d talk to anyone who would listen. Hell, she could still walk back then. That’s why they keep her in the house, now. That’s why she’s in that chair. Those fish people your girlfriend saw—“

“Betty is  _ not  _ my girlfriend, Christ’s sakes! I am  _ engag—“ _

_ “ _ Ain’t she?”

“Why the hell are we discussing this?”

FP licked his lips and took another swig of his near voided whiskey bottle. Jughead had not shared Betty and Veronica’s tale with anyone. So he did not know how it had seeped into Riverdale’s common cauldron of gossip already. But evidently it had. 

Must have been Archie. Betty told him too much, and the boy had a serious problem with secrets, though he never meant ill. 

“Old Rose told me everything,” FP went on. “About Marius Blossom and his deal with the Deep Ones—that’s what they’re called, the fishmen. The Deep Ones. The Deep Ones, they’re the ones who taught the Blossoms to worship the Old Ones. Who turned them onto the idea of raising Cthulhu. And they’ve been trying for a real long time, Jug. Marius failed, his son failed, and Clifford failed. But, see, that’s not all of it—Cthulhu, he’s a small fry. He’s just like a herald. You know, the drummer boy. The real chief of them all is a thing they call Yog-Sothoth.” FP’s voice plummeted as he spoke the final dread name. Jughead swore he could feel what little warmth there was slip from the air. “Yog-Sothoth—he’s the gate, Rose told me. And the  _ watchman  _ at the gate. The gate to eternity. When Cthulhu awakens, he’ll rip open the gates for Yog-Sothoth. And when Yog-Sothoth is through, he’ll envelop the whole earth, and then awake the rest of the Old Ones.” 

Jughead stood. He told himself the cause was disgust at his father’s lies. In truth it was probably fear. 

“Enough,” he said.

“Enough, what?” 

“Enough of your goddamned stories. Enough of this nonsense. If you won’t look me in the fucking eye and tell me the  _ truth  _ for once in your life, maybe I’ll tell Constable Keller about your little tete a tete with Clifford Blossom. Maybe he can help me out.” 

It was an idle threat. They both knew it. Even if he did report to Keller, Clifford Blossom was beyond the reach of the law in a paltry little town like this. FP stared up at his son, more hurt in his eyes than wrath. 

“I was getting there,” said FP. “Why I was talking with Clifford Blossom.”

“Save it,” Jughead motioned for silence. “If all you’ve got is more ghost stories.” 

And before his father could offer further fantasy, he stormed back out into the dreary night. 

He rushed through the obscurant fog, and the dark, slanted walls of the Southside around him became in the prism of his mind the great and sweeping walls of R’lyeh.

But there was no R’lyeh, he reminded himself. No Deep Ones. No. That was all madness. Betty and Veronica were confused. They had seen things, induced by fear and paranoia. His father was a delusional drunk, if not purposefully toying with him. 

Then Jughead had a thought. Oh God—

He did not enjoy the thought. But he would not be able to sleep if he did not follow it through. 

Betty would be asleep by now. Even if she was not, Alice would not be keen to let him in at this hour, especially not on the heels of his earlier visit. She was probably still smarting from her daughter’s trip to Hangman’s Reef.

So he went instead northwest, to the crumbling old townhouse he knew Hermione Lodge had leased for her and her daughter’s return to Riverdale. A brief knock, and Hermione herself answered. She was a very beautiful woman, perhaps a year or two over forty, very much the image of her daughter. 

“Hello, there. Can I help you?”

“Hello. Is Veronica home?”

“She’s not in the habit of taking gentleman callers at this hour,” Hermione informed him.

“Really?” he said, and then registered Hermione’s look and realized how poorly the word had come from his mouth. “I’m sorry—that didn’t mean—I didn’t mean to sound as—can I please speak to Veronica? This is a business call.”

“You have business with my daughter?” Then before he could respond or justify himself, her eyes glinted with recollection and she said: “you’re FP’s boy, aren’t you?” 

“Yes, Mrs. Lodge.”

“I hope you’re nothing like your father,” she said. Then she redirected her voice into the house and called: “Veronica, a friend of yours is here!”

Jughead was allowed entry, and he appraised the interior of the downcast old house. It was modest, though greater than the majority of homes in this little town. He figured it to have been built towards the second half of the 19th century. It had that kind of optimistic opulence of the years concurrent with and immediately succeeding the Rebellion, a sweeping single staircase flanked by a parlor and a kitchen paneled in pinewood. But the wood was old and faded, fragmented by slithering fissures and chipping at the corners. An ancient oil lamp shaped as a sperm whale glowed in the corner. 

Veronica appeared at the head of the stairs. She swept down to him like greeting a returning soldier. 

Hermione went aside. 

Jughead took Veronica by the arm and led her into the parlor.

“Is there a reason you’re at my house some time after midnight?” she inquired. Then before he could respond: “did you speak with your father?”

He didn’t answer, but instead presented a question of his own. 

“When Rose told you her Deep On—fishmen story. You said she mentioned like a—a chant her father and his men recited when they sacrificed to these things. On Hangman’s Reef.”

“Yeah,” Veronica said. “What, you believe us, now?”

“Do you remember how it went? The chant?” 

She took her eyes from his and chewed her lip.

“Something like…’ _ya! Ya! Calu wagne_ ’? I don’t know. It sounded mostly like nonsense, truth be told. Chilling nonsense, but still.”

“‘ _ Ph’nglui mglw’nahf Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn? _ ’” asked Jughead. His body seized for a moment as the dread words poured from his throat. 

Veronica’s eyes rippled with a cold awe.

“Y—yeah, that’s it. Where’d you hear it? Do you bel—“

He grabbed her shoulders briefly.

“I have to go.”

Jughead rushed back out. The fog had grown thicker with the hours. How was it his father and old Lady Blossom knew this same formula? Unless they told truth—unless there was at least  _ some  _ germ of truth hidden within their recollections. 

His mind spun hard towards lunacy and senselessness, and he employed all the powers of simple reason and composure to maintain it. He did not believe in ghosts or spirits or ancient elder things come from beyond the wild stars. 

Yet how else might he explain this fantastic confluence of the disparate accounts? Where might FP and old Rose have learned the same bizarre chant? 

One of the names his father had listed took principal place in his mind. The rest were novel, but this one he swore was familiar. 

_ Yog-Sothoth. _

Where would he have heard that name? 

His personal collection of literature was small. Granted, most people in town did not maintain libraries at all. He figured he owned about thirty-five or forty books, collected with great diligence through the years since he’d learned to read at four. When Jughead had abandoned his father’s house, he’d taken his books with him, as the only possessions he truly valued.

Through his years of drifting, he trusted Betty and the Coopers in general to safeguard his collection, since he had no permanent home. He had considered moving them into Thornhill following the engagement, but now was greatly relieved he had not done so. 

So Jughead made for the Register now. He did not knock the front door, certain Alice Cooper would rise and answer. He went around back, to the window he knew to be Betty’s. He rapped his knuckles lightly on the shudders. The window flew open so rapidly that he decided she must have already been awake.

Betty glared out at him, her sea green eyes hooded and her long flaxen hair undone. She was still lovely, of course, but she looked to have a touch of something in the face. Her normally colored cheeks had lost their hue, and her lips held a tinge of blue. She looked to be trembling as she braced herself against the window frame. And when she spoke, it was with a cracked and feeble tongue. “Juggie…it’s nearly 2:00 in the morning? What are you  _ doing  _ here? If my mother sees you—“

Jughead took the lack of an immediate rebuff as an invitation and slipped in through the window. She rolled her eyes. 

“You make a habit of climbing in through the windows of young women who are not your intended?” 

“No,” he assured. “But I make an exception for you.” 

She dipped her head and failed to resist a sheepish smile. He smiled back, broader and much more obnoxious.

“What do you want?” 

“My books. That chest. I—“

Betty picked up and lit a single candle. Then she knelt down and drew the chest out from beneath her bed. It looked much like the picture of a pirate’s sunken gold in a children’s book, hewn out of smooth sable wood and banded around with rusty iron, sealed by a single opened lock. He joined her on the floor and threw the box open.

“This really couldn’t wait until morning?” she pouted

“I don’t think I would’ve slept.”

“Without seeing me?”

He gave her a long sideways glance, then he set about digging through the mess of books packed into the chest. Jughead set aside first those he knew would be irrelevant. He would not find the name ‘Yog-Sothoth’ in  _ the Sorrows of Young Werther  _ or  _ the Mysterious Island _ , or  _ the Lives of the Caesars _ . 

Jughead hefted up a thick, dusty old tome embossed with the faux-golden title  _ Customs and Superstitions of the Orient,  _ by E. Gerard. Scribner’s Sons, 1872. He recalled purchasing it upon one of his few trips into Arkham, from a rundown little bookshop closing its doors and struggling to rid itself of all surplus stock. So he’d paid cut price for a good book.

“Could you at least tell me what you’re looking for?” Betty asked. “So I can help?”

He did not intend to slight her, but he was too involved, and took to thumbing furiously through the leather-bound volume, eyes hunting that singular appellation while Betty’s dim candle guttered above him.

Jughead found it at last in chapter IV, the section on pre-Islamic beliefs and practices of Arabia. He read aloud while Betty hovered at his shoulder.

“…with the coming of Mohammad, most of the rituals and beliefs of heathen Arabia were suppressed. Still, there persisted and do persist scarce traces of this ancient worship, preserved for all time in the common religion of the people, particularly those country dwellers, whose intrinsically insular nature ensures that even over the course of centuries change comes slowly and may not come at all.” He ran ahead on the pages. Flipped two. “The nomads of the Yemeni countryside speak and on dire occasions still swear by the names of old pagan gods. A particular name spoken rarely and with great care belongs to an obscure divinity who these rough men fear more than they do the  _ Iblis _ himself. This dread epithet is crudely transliterated as ‘Yog-Sothoth’. Said to reside in the black gulfs beyond eternity and without the bounds of time itself, he in power inferior only to the Daemon Sultan Azathoth, the Blind Idiot God himself. He is not counted as ‘evil’, but perhaps more terribly, beyond wickedness and virtue, and simply inscrutable in his ways and passions. He has no true care to wipe out man, but wields such ferocious might he might obliterate whole worlds and galaxies at a whim or to slake a moment’s appetite. It is said that with the proper formulas men might summon Yog-Sothoth and even win favors from the great god, for he is not only a force of destruction, but can even create new life. When he leaks by part into our world, there are cloud and lightning and thunder, and by certain tellings he was sometimes called upon to make fruitful a barren womb. But these blessings never came at any less than fatal price. Yog-Sothoth is treated at length in the infamous ‘Al-Zaif’ (better known by its Greek title, the Necronomicon). Herein, Yog-Sothoth is described as the keeper and guardian of the gates between worlds, through which he might loose the races of elder and forgotten gods onto the earth when he so desires.”

Jughead closed the book and it came to his attention that his teeth were chattering some. His eyes were heavy in his skull. Betty, still looking sickly herself, touched his shoulder and regarded him with deep concern.

“Are you okay?”

“Ye—I don’t know what to say. About anything.” 

There was no way his father would have ever learned the name ‘Yog-Sothoth’ from this book or any like it. He was not a reader, and even now struggled with his second tongue of English. He must have heard it. Just as he’d said.

“What’s the ‘Necronomicon’?” Betty asked, voice soft and careful. 

“Something of a legend,” he said. “It’s supposed to be an old grimoire—like a book of cosmic mysteries and formulas—written by a poet called al-Hazred. He’s more usually called just ‘the Mad Arab’, which ought to give you some idea of the book’s delightful contents. They say it drives readers to madness. You understand, as a price for all of the…arcane knowledge. I think there are something like five copies in all the world.” 

“Sounds charming,” Betty said. She ran her tongue over her dry and pallid lips. 

And then there was a cry, a sort of half-started groan from the next room. Betty, despite being less than the picture of health herself, leapt to her feet and exclaimed: “Polly!” 

She rushed out into the hallway, and Jughead saw he had little choice but to follow. They barged into Polly’s room to find her atop her bedsheets, arms spread wide, twisting and rolling in a fit of something that might have been ecstasy or sheer pain. Her belly had grown, and she would surely be nearing delivery soon. 

“Polly? Hey, Polly?” Betty touched her sister’s face. Polly spun round, and one of her clasping hands closed on Betty’s wrist. She squealed. Polly’s lips sprouted into a crude rictus grin, and the natural glow of her cerulean eyes failed to account for this brilliant shine that cut apart the darkness. Jughead took an unwilling step away.

“Oh, Betty!” Polly sighed. “He’s here, you know. Jason. I feel him. I  _ do _ .” 

Jughead thought of the vision of Jason he’d seen that night in Thornhill. His blood thickened in the veins. 

“You have a fever,” Betty said with no conviction. “I—“

Polly leaned over the side of her bed and vomited. Betty pirouetted to avoid the vile discharge, but her bare feet were caught in the spray nonetheless. Jughead reached forward and pulled her away.

The regurgitation hardly looked like anything Polly might have eaten. It was viscous, compact and green streaked with some mysterious black substance. Jughead’s stomach turned, because immediately he related it to the sunken corpse city of his nightmares. And of his father’s stories. 

Polly righted herself on the bed, green vomit caking her lips. Betty covered her mouth and backed up into Jughead.

“ _ Iä! Iä!”  _ Polly cried. “ _ Yog-Sothoth! Iä Yog-Sothoth!”  _

Jughead nearly vomited himself as the dread words tumbled from her lips.

Then he flicked his eyes to her window, the curtains spread wide, affording an idyllic view of the rolling Atlantic beneath the stars. 

And there, some twenty yards off shore, he saw them. Slithering through the surf, the dark shapes, falling short of humanity and all the more loathsome for the humanity they  _ did  _ possess. Webbed and clawed limbs thrashing the cold grey water as they went. Parallel to the shore, but slowly maneuvering back towards Hangman’s Reef glimmering in the distance. The moon beat down on their vile, scaly hides so that they really  _ gleamed  _ like precious stones.

And he could deny no more.

* * *

The next few weeks were for Jughead Jones weeks of intensive reflection and redefinition. 

He was never particularly given to philosophizing about the origins, nature, or ordering of the universe. His father was naturally not a church-going man, and irreverent, as sailors are wont to be. Consequently Jughead did not grow up with any religion, save for the handful of occasions he’d accompanied the Coopers or the Andrewses to Riverdale Presbyterian Church and quirked his head at the doctrines of the Virgin Birth or Total Depravity. He had always defined himself as an agnostic, perhaps a weak atheist. 

But now—

He had seen the Deep Ones for himself, besides the testimony of Betty, Veronica, and Grandmother Rose Blossom. Their existence he could not deny. 

But what did their existence  _ imply _ ? Did it follow that R’lyeh existed? That the Great Cthulhu was truly sleeping in his crypt beneath the waves, and that Jughead’s own father had narrowly thwarted his awakening? 

Worse, did this confirm the mad tale of Old Rose? That the Blossom clan decades ago had made a pact with the Deep Ones, and with the Old Ones they worshipped? 

Had Clifford truly schemed to raise Cthulhu and thus doom humanity to wretched slavery? And for what, the promise of eternal life on a blasted earth, in base servitude to that eldritch god? Was he perhaps scheming  _ still _ ? 

Jughead thought of Jason’s corpse, cold and dead, just off Hangman’s Reef. Rose had said that at the reef in years gone by her father offered human sacrifice to the Deep Ones, and by proxy to Cthulhu himself. Had Jason been a  _ sacrifice _ ?

“It’s safest to assume,” Betty said, when she, Jughead, and Veronica convened at Pop’s for a hasty appraisal of the situation, some nights after Polly’s fit and Jughead’s first sighting of the Deep Ones. “That the worst is true. That  _ all  _ of this is true.” 

“This…this Yog-Sothoth character,” Veronica said. “What’s his angle, exactly?”

“He’s some kind of god,” Jughead said. “Beyond time and space. I suppose he’s the chief god of whatever demented pantheon the Blossoms and the fishmen—the Deep Ones—worship. Cthulhu’s supposed to open up the door to Yog-Sothoth, and damn us all that way..” 

“But you said he failed to do that,” Veronica said. “You said your father knocked that…Cthulhu thing unconscious again.”

“Yeah. But he didn’t kill it. And he said they’d tried before—Marius Blossom, Rose’s father. He tried and failed. So did his son and his son, and now Clifford. What’s to stop him for trying again? And maybe succeeding the next time?” 

“Cheryl…” Betty said, meekly. 

Jughead rounded on her. “What of her?”

“How does she fit into this?” 

“One morning…some weeks ago. The day that you two came to Thornhill, as a matter of fact,” Jughead prepared to confess what he’d heard. “I heard Penelope and Clifford speaking with one another. They discussed allowing Keller to take her as Jason’s killer. If she  _ is  _ a part of all this, I doubt very much she’s playing a willing part.” 

Veronica and Betty looked on the worn table, eyes downcast. Pop Tate, in the rear of the eatery, carted a load of plates out from the kitchen. He paused momentarily to watch his customers. 

“Maybe we should tell Constable Keller,” Betty opined.

Veronica actually snorted in laughter, and then quickly swallowed the next guffaw when she caught the emotion in her friend’s face.

“With all due respect, Betty,” Veronica began to say.

“How are we going to broach that one?” Jughead took Veronica’s objection for himself. “‘Oh, Constable, Clifford Blossom intends to perform some mad ritual that shall release a race of long vanished elder gods who will in turn enslave all mankind. What does the Massachusetts Penal Code prescribe for such instances?’” 

Betty stared at him, unamused.

“I’m sorry,” Jughead quickly amended. “That was rude. I am a bit…overtaxed, lately. As are we all.” 

“What, then?” Betty demanded. “Should we just sit here idle eating sandwiches until the world falls apart?” 

“We still don’t know precisely what’s going on,” Jughead cautioned.

And Veronica: “What more do we need to know? No matter what—even if Blossom can’t tear open some cosmic portal or raise this Cthulhu thing again, he isn’t planning anything  _ salutary.  _ For God’s sakes, the man already killed his own son, doubtless as a sacrifice to those…things in the water. Did I already mention Rose said her father even gave his own son to  _ marry  _ one of those things? And have  _ children  _ with it?”

Jughead spoke again. “At Thornhill—in the same breath I heard Clifford and Penelope discuss handing Cheryl over to Keller, I heard them mention something about a  _ book _ . A book they deemed as ‘necessary’ for…something. I wonder if they weren’t talking about the Necronomicon.” 

“I’m sorry, the what?” 

“Necronomicon,” Betty explained, though she herself had only learned of such a tome some nights before. “The ‘Book of the Dead’.” 

“These  _ names _ ,” Veronica exclaimed. “The Book of the Dead? The Corpse City of R’lyeh? Dread Cthulhu? Deep Ones? I—who  _ invents  _ these?”

“Well, they certainly establish a mood,” Jughead said. “Anyway—the Necronomicon is a grimoire. Book of incantations and arcane knowledge. If it  _ is  _ what Mr. and Mrs. Blossom were speaking of, then I suspect they  _ need  _ the Necronomicon for whatever madness they’ve planned. So long as they don’t have a copy, I’ll tentatively say the world is safe.”

“How do you know they don’t have a copy?” Betty asked.

“Well,” Jughead spoke with a wry, sardonic edge. “We’re still here, aren’t we?” 

Pop shuffled up to them, a round of waters in hand. It was all they’d ordered, as none of the three felt especially peckish. 

“We’ve been getting a hell of a lot of rain,” Pop said, gazing out onto the gray, drizzly sea. “Not a day of sun for the past…month.”

“Well,” Jughead replied. “It  _ is  _ Riverdale. Rain is something of an occupational hazard.”

“Not like this,” Pop said. “Can’t remember it this bad since the fall of ’98. Though actually, that was worse.”

“What happened in ’98?” Veronica inquired.

Tate shook his head, gazing out through his windows on the sea. 

“Damndest thing. Thunderstorms without end. Must have lasted two months. Hardly touched another town, either. Couple of poor souls drowned, here, too. Bad year.”

Jughead seized on that bit of information.

Pop squinted down at his patrons.

“Are you fellas okay? Betty, you don’t look so good.” 

Betty mustered a smile for the old man. Of course, he was not wrong. Her skin had lost more of its color. Her eyes seemed bereft of much luster, wider even, as if the skin round them was pulling tighter. The rashes on her neck grew hotter and fiercer. And the cramps still ailed her. 

“I’m okay,” she lied. Pop appeared entirely unconvinced. 

“Well, if you ever want me to take a look at you, you know where to find me. My memory may be going but it isn’t gone yet.”

She indicated her thanks and smiled again.

“Thanks, Pop.”

“You know, I pulled a rebel bullet out of your Grandfather Billy’s leg at Deep Bottom.” 

Betty nodded. She’d heard the story, once or twice. Her grandfather had been an officer in the 29th, when Tate had served as the medic’s assistant.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.” 

They left the eatery with no plan and no further towards understanding the current pervading lunacy than they already were.

The next few weeks were grim.

Jughead sought out his father, whose story he now tentatively believed. He would have to apologize, of course, and admit that maybe for once it was he who was wrong. His father had not finished the story when Jughead exited the house in anger. Perhaps he had more to say.

But his father, ever predictable in his slovenly patterns, abandoned them. When Jughead came knocking at the little hovel’s door, he received no answer. When he visited the docks in search of FP, he was either absent or roughly denied his son’s attempts at conversation. 

“You didn’t want to talk that night. And I orter talk, now?” 

“Goddammit, FP! I’m listening to you! I’ll hear you talk about ghosts and gods until the crack of doom! Just help me out, man!”

And FP shook his head and turned to go. Jughead reached out and gripped his father by the sleeve. 

“Don’t touch me, boy,” the man growled.

So he let him alone. 

Cheryl’s company too, quick became a scarce commodity. He was not invited to Thornhill anymore, and Jughead suspected rather strongly the hands of Clifford and Penelope at work in that matter. 

“I was hoping to call on Cheryl,” he hissed over the phone (the Blossoms having the first of a very few landlines in town). 

“Not today,” was Penelope’s curt reply. “She’s indisposed. We’re still preparing the memorial of our  _ murdered  _ son, you know.” 

He began to sincerely fret for her safety, trapped in that house as she was with a pair he now suspected of being evil wizards (the madness of it all!). Had she not still made occasional appearances in town, Jughead very likely would have suspected her already disposed of by her ghoulish progenitors. 

After Jughead had not seen his fiancée for near two weeks, he happened to find himself at a table in Pop’s, chewing a sandwich he likely wouldn’t be able to digest for all the nerves, when Cheryl shambled into the eatery, her tyrannical mother following close behind. 

Cheryl kept her eyes tight to her feet, shuffling along like Penelope held a dagger to her back. 

Cheryl saw him and smiled. Penelope caught the same sight and frowned. 

“Darling!” Cheryl exclaimed. Jughead swallowed. Cheryl hastened to his side and threw her arms fondly round his neck. He stiffened. Penelope hovered some distance off, pitch eyes smoking. “How’ve you been?” Cheryl asked, with much intention and bombast.

“I’ve been fine,” he lied, in a less than persuasive tone. He thought to ask “are you safe?” but did not know if that would be prudent. 

Cheryl made short work of his indecision.

“Constable Keller’s come by again. Almost like a regular guest, now,” she whispered harshly into his ear, low enough that her dread mother might miss it. “I swear, he’s on the verge of arresting me.” A low pause, and she drew her lips right up against the curve of his ear. “Help me.” 

Then he was freed from her embrace. She beamed graciously and very sweetly, and said: “I’ll see you at the memorial!” Then Cheryl returned to her mother’s side. Penelope fixed her with a long and discerning look, but at last let it lie. They made their brief order and departed again.

Jughead lay back in his chair, face to the sky. His heart throbbed with much ardor. 

Dear God.

What was there to do?

* * *

Most everyone in Riverdale received a summons (for it was more that than an invitation) to Jason Blossom’s memorial service, on the half-curated grounds that sprawled behind Thornhill, face to the storm-thrown sea. This was a patch of earth wherein the sand of the beach below mingled with old, feral roses and bowed orange trees, the miserable refuse of Penelope’s misguided attempts to establish a garden some years ago. 

Betty Cooper attended the ceremony along with Veronica Lodge and her mother, for Alice Cooper could not bring herself to mourn a slain Blossom, and her father was once again indisposed (not to say that if he were sound of body he would be champing at the bit to file into Thornhill, head bowed and condolences on his lips). In fact, Betty had not seen her father in four full days, while he lay weary in his bed. And the last time she  _ had  _ seen him, he’d looked so pale and so drawn, and he had hardly spoken, so hoarse and guttural was his voice. 

So she came with her new good friend, Veronica, and with them came Archie Andrews. Cpl. Archie Andrews, American Expeditionary Force, he’d served with Jason under Pershing, through Soissons and the Rhineland. Betty had never thought her friend fit for soldiering. It was not that he suffered any physical deficiency. He was tall, broad-shouldered and muscular, thanks to the carpentry learned at his father’s knee. He was brave, too. Betty recalled fondly how he’d fought off a wild dog that had accosted her and Jughead when they were children. But he was so warm-spirited, so amiable that she could not imagine him capable of aiming a rifle at another man and squeezing the trigger. 

Indeed, when he and Jason came home, Archie was reluctant to boast of his exploits, though the older men (especially those who’d never smelt gunsmoke themselves) tried to coax out stories of ‘killing jerries’. All he would say, with a patriotic and rueful shrug of the shoulders was: “I did my duty.” 

Jason on the other hand, was delighted to tell in vivid detail how he’d driven his bayonet through the gut of a German stormtrooper, and then jerked it upwards, unseaming him from nave to the chops. Or how his grenades had cooked those machine gunners alive in their nest. 

Archie lead the way, now, his arm linked with Veronica’s. They ascended the stony steps to Thornhill’s front gate, to be greeted by Penelope. 

“Hello, Archibald,” she said, and he was the only one to receive a warm greeting. Betty and Veronica received curt glares, and dauntless Hermione an indignant “after all these years.” 

But they went through and out into the back garden, where the rest of the driven mourners stood already assembled. 

“Well, there’s Cheryl,” Veronica whispered. “Looks like she’s still in one piece, Jughead’s worries aside."

Cheryl stood beneath a withering orange tree. Fretful Jughead in fact stood beside her, arm in hers. She touched his shoulder with her free hand, and sniffled elegantly. The black veil obscured her pallid, lovely face, clinging to the tip of her nose and her cheeks, damp with tears. 

Jughead granted his friends a desultory nod as they joined themselves to the rest of the crowd, but he stood by his fiancée and made no move to welcome them.

A large sepia-toned photograph of Sgt. Jason Blossom in his uniform, from the day he’d come to Riverdale, stood at the head of the crowd. Beneath that was a fine black silk banner blazoned with silver lettering:  _ Jason Alexander Blossom; 1898-1920 _

Betty moved to stand against the trunk of a birch, next to a rosebush. There were no seats, yet it was too much to ask that she remain on foot for the entirety of the service. For she was in severe discomfort. She pressed her fingers to the flesh of her stiff, aching neck. The pain magnified by the day. It was now to the point she could not touch her chin to her chest, or stargaze at a hard angle. The rashes on her throat graduated from irritation to meager torment. They were closer to lesions or even scars now, than anything. Her eyes took on a glassy, fervent quality and folks began to note that she appeared every minute as if she were popping them wide open. As a capstone on the piled up heap of maladies, her lungs seemed to weaken and falter, and to draw a breath was now laborious. 

Betty was at last convinced she was suffering from some terrible sickness, and Veronica had prevailed upon her that she ought to see Pop Tate post haste, and then probably the doctor in Greendale. Most agreed, save Alice Cooper, who stubbornly insisted that her daughter was stricken only by a mild bout of fever. Then again, Alice was also convinced her eldest daughter’s slimy green-black vomit, fits of wild ecstasy, and invocations of impossible alien names were simply the symptoms of common pregnancy, so perhaps she was not the best judge on the matter. 

Veronica and Archie, ever the good comrades helped Betty bear up against the tree. 

“You sure you’re okay to be here, Betty?” Archie asked. “You don’t look—“

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” she said, sharper than she’d intended. So she repeated, more softly: “I’m fine, Archie.” 

Betty looked out on the ocean behind them, gray-green and crashing up on the sandy stones in its ancient, primal rhythm. It calmed her. It imparted a deep feeling of safety and she could nearly feel the cool waves on her skin. She almost wished she was down there, disporting in the rushing current. Even after what she and Veronica had seen.

The service proceeded apace. 

Cheryl was not allowed to speak. There was a moment where she made a move to the head of the crowd, where her parents stood. But Penelope fixed her in place with short and furious stares. Jughead gently held her arm, dissuading from her rash action. 

Penelope discoursed some on poor, accomplished, noble, dead Jason. 

She told a number of colorful stories from the boy’s youth. 

“I recall once, when he and Cheryl were young, and playing at federals against rebels. They came marching through the foyer in their little blue coats, banging away at the drums and singing ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee! The flag that makes you free!’. I mustn’t have been in the mood, because I snapped ‘for the love of God, bring the jubilee somewhere else!’”

The crowd laughed. Even Betty smiled a little. She twisted her head round to see that Cheryl too was laughing lightly. And her tears seemed to have dried. 

Next Clifford rose to say a word. In the midst of his address he remarked that Jason “had too much of his father in him”. Again the attendees chuckled, taking it for a self-deprecating joke. Betty might have been forgiven for thinking his face tended more towards frustration or fright than mourning. Every so often, he spared a moment to turn and make a quick visual sweep of Thornhill manor, as if it might catch fire. 

When the services proper were concluded, Penelope dourly ushered the guests into the ‘Winter Salon’ for a light supper. 

Betty and Veronica and Archie moved to follow. Archie moved ahead, up the path, to the door, and was caught up in conversation by Constable Keller decked in full uniform. 

But before the girls could go ahead, a hand fell on Betty’s shoulder. She yelped, so tender was her flesh with the pain. 

“Shhh!” 

It was Cheryl, Jughead at her side. 

“Cheryl—“ Betty scolded. 

“Pardon the fright,” Cheryl begged, her great tenebrous eyes so dull and mournful they pulled at Betty’s heart. “But I need  _ desperately _ to talk to you. And Veronica. And Forsythe.” 

Betty, still ignorant of precisely where Cheryl stood in this absurd drama, prepared herself to deny everything. 

“Ch—“

Cheryl made doubly sure the four of them were isolated in the garden, and that the rest of the guests had repaired to the dining room.

“I know that you’re all aware,” Cheryl said, shoulders trembling. “Of the Deep Ones. The pact my fathers made with them. That we even  _ bred  _ with them. Great Cthulhu. R’lyeh. And I assure you, it’s all true. Every word.” 

Betty’s head, already oppressed with the fever (or whatever manner of illness it was) pulsed violently and her vision flared white to red to grey. She’d maintained some small measure of hope that all this would be revealed for an elaborate hoax or a misunderstanding, and some rational explanation would be supplied. That meager hope was all but entirely gone.

“All of it?” Jughead prompted. 

“You saw them, didn’t you, Jughead?” Cheryl asked.

“Yes,” he said, weakly. 

“So…Jason,” Veronica presumed to say. 

“A sacrifice,” Cheryl cleared a fresh round of tears. “The first stage of the great ritual.” 

“What great ritual might that be?” Jughead asked, and his eyes told he already knew, but wished he did not. Betty wanted to embrace him. To embrace  _ all  _ of them. 

“To raise Cthulhu that he might open the gate in turn,” Cheryl sniffled. “That they and the rest of the worshippers might reign as priests of the Great Old Ones forever, over the rest of mankind, reduced to servitude.”

“This is insane,” Veronica bleated. “Insane!” 

“So is the cosmos,” Cheryl said, sadly. She shrugged, with the intimation there was nothing to be done about that.

Jughead grasped her shoulders. 

“So then what is the next stage?” 

Cheryl smiled dimly. 

“My death, I suppose.” 

“Why haven’t they killed you, yet?” Betty interjected, and then feared the question was too forceful.

“That’s just it,” Cheryl responded. “They can’t. Not yet. They need the book.”

“The Necronomicon,” Betty assumed. 

“Precisely. Therein lie the rituals, the formulas without which sacrifice is useless. Until they have the book, they can do nothing. Once the book is theirs, the curtain falls as it does upon a dreadful actor,” she sighed with much theatrical inflection.

“Why wait this long?” Veronica asked. “Your grandmother said your family has—“

“Been trying for generations, yes,” Cheryl explained. “Ever since the Deep Ones first instructed Grandmother Rose’s father in the ways of the Old Ones. Marius tried. His son tried. My father has tried before—and failed, in no small part thanks to your father, Forsythe.” Jughead nodded. “But conditions have never been quite perfect. Now they are. Oh, woe!” 

“What conditions?” Jughead asked.

“Too many minutiae and it truly isn’t important. What’s important is the book!”

“Do you  _ have  _ one?” Jughead demanded. “A Necronomicon?” 

“We  _ did _ ,” Cheryl said. “John Dee’s English translation. A poor translation, but unfortunately sufficient for what they intend. But I destroyed it!” she said, with a hint of victory.

“So then…are we sweet?” Veronica asked. 

“No,” Cheryl bowed her veiled head. “There are more in the world. Many frauds, but unfortunately a small number of genuine copies. In particular, there is one here in Massachusetts!” 

Betty bristled at that. 

“Listen—“ Cheryl went on. “The library of Miskatonic contains the unabridged Latin version of the text, of 17th century provenance. My mother and father will try for it, surely.” She curled her fingers into the lapels of Jughead’s coat and pulled him fiercely to her. “It  _ must  _ be destroyed. Oh, Forsythe! Won’t you get it for me?  _ Please _ !” 

Jughead’s face grew deep with consternation and base dread. 

“Cheryl, I—“

“ _ Please _ ?” she pleaded. “You know what’s at stake, don’t you?”

“You’re asking me to rob Miskatonic University.” He stroked his chin and smiled rueful. “I always wanted to attend, you know. My father said Clifford once promised that—“ he killed the rest of the sentence. 

Betty and Veronica simply gazed on them with unsure tongues. 

“ _ Please _ !” Cheryl begged once more.

Jughead’s face slipped into that rough, lined look that Betty knew so well. It meant he was thinking and considering, seriously. He turned to look towards the manor, as if he feared to find Clifford or Penelope listening in. Then he said: “Alright. I will!” 

“Oh, God bless you, Forsythe!” Cheryl exclaimed. She cupped his cheeks. “You are a  _ good  _ man.” 

Betty too found herself breathing a sigh of relief. If that was all they needed to do—destroy this blasted book. Then so be it. And she trusted Jughead to do so. 

They moved as a group to rejoin the rest of Riverdale in the dining room, and hoped no one thought much of their absence. Betty lagged behind, and that was why she saw it.

She happened to roll her eyes up towards the growling sky, and when they came back down they lighted on the high window of Thornhill, set dead-center in the gabled roof and looking out on the sea. And there was a figure silhouetted there, tall and nearly invisible with the sun angled right over the house. But even at three stories Betty could make out the man’s neatly coiffed copper hair and frozen blue eyes. 

_ Jason _ ?

No. She looked again and the window was empty. It was Archie, perhaps. For some reason he might have excused himself from supper and wandered up to Thornhill’s third story. For some reason.

That was the only suitable explanation. The blue eyes had been merely an illusion cast by the sun. 

And anyways, then she was struck by another hard and sudden cramp in her neck, and could think of nothing else.

* * *

Jughead allowed himself to be led back into the house, mind caught in a vortex of impossibilities and creeping madness. He could not bring himself to surrender that last remaining flash of faith in nature and order. But it was going quick. 

He had agreed to rob Miskatonic University. Certainly, to stop humanity’s enslavement to some ancient elder god from under the sea, but it was still a mad prospect. 

Cheryl took his hand and pulled him aside. Betty and Veronica went ahead of them into the dining room. His fiancée carried him into the dim shadow beneath the stairwell.

“Forsythe,” she called softly. “Jughead.” 

“Yes?”

She held his hands.

“I have something else to tell you. And only you.” 

Cheryl unwrapped the layers of black ribbon and crepe around her waist. When it was gone, Jughead saw that her belly had a slight swell to it. For a moment he understood nothing, and tensed to shake his head. And then Cheryl said:

“I’m with child,” she said, amid fresh tears.

This struck him with immensity greater than had the fishmen or the ancient gods. 

“I—“

“Yes.” 

He stole another glance. She looked rather far along. Perhaps only three months or so, but hardly one had passed since the first and only time they’d slept together. Then again, he was far from an expert on pregnancy. 

And the concept that he could ever be a father both terrified and bewildered. He had never truly considered such a thing could even be possible. He’d always held so much fear of becoming  _ his  _ father, that the prospect of siring a child of his own frightened him, for it would in some way be a length closer to recapitulating FP’s own history.

He wondered about germ plasm and the heritability of personal character. Jughead still hoped to live a life without the drudgery and pain that had been his father’s lot, and his father’s before. But what if he simply could not escape his blood? What if one day, as he grew in age, he found himself in the gutter again, sucking on a bottle? And what if he’d doomed this child to the same? A wave of fear hit him, entirely distinct from the dread of eldritch horrors and alien portals. 

“Aren’t you happy?” she asked.

“I—“ Was he? Was he  _ ever  _ happy, anymore? “Yes.” 

She kissed him, briefly and softly. 

“So do this for the sake of our child and all the rest.”

He nodded.

Before he left Thornhill for the day, he was treated to one more wondrous sight. For at some point, his father had arrived. Uninvited, no doubt. The man hovered at the edges of the garden, avoiding the crowds. FP was dressed in the very finest clothes that he owned, which were of course not particularly fine. He possessed a dark jacket and a dark pair of trousers, both fraying at the seams. He wore his same old beaten sailor’s boots. 

Jughead did not think anyone had noticed the man’s presence yet. 

As the guests finished their supper, and were herded back out into the garden, Jughead watched his father approach Clifford. Clifford froze and a stiffness went into his limbs. Jughead tried to weave his way through the crowd, as to hear whatever was said between them, if anything. 

FP grabbed Clifford by the lapel. Clifford did not cry out or demand the man expelled. He slapped FP’s hand away and hissed something into his ear. 

FP responded with as much violence in the twist of his neck and the heave of his chest. Clifford drew himself back a little bit. Jughead fought to get closer, but lost out on his chance. 

All he heard of his father’s next sentence was: “not you, you bastard!”

Then Clifford evidently decided he grew bored of the volleying, for he said louder than any of the words spoken thus far: “I don’t believe you were invited to the services, Mr. Jones.” 

FP spit at the man’s feet.

Then two of the burlier attendees came forth and promptly led his father away, before Jughead could reach him. He offered no resistance.


	6. the Book of the Dead

Betty Cooper felt as if her poor mind was coming asunder at its seams. Her poor mind. She’d seen a photograph of a human brain, once, in one of Jughead’s books. It was a ghastly looking object, really, like a lump of slaughtered flesh all heaped together, crinkled and dry (as the specimen in the book had been desiccated). It had bothered her immensely to think that was the seat of her consciousness, the ghost in the machine. That this queer little hunk of nerves and ganglia  _ was  _ Elizabeth Cooper. 

The thought of a purely material universe frightened her some. Her mother was in the strict Calvinist tradition of old New England. Even if Alice Cooper was not quite beholden to all the doctrines of the Reformed Church, she certainly believed in the spirit and the continuation of the human essence after death, and her family inevitably imbibed that philosophy. Betty did not particularly like to imagine that life and death was all reducible to atoms knocking against one another.

Yet compared to the hints of reality’s true fabric splitting wide before her, such a clean, material world seemed quite comforting indeed. Better senseless atoms than the playthings of alien gods and races from below the sea.

Her father had not been out of his room in five days, now. Polly was in much the same state, and since that gruesome night she’d vomited three more times the sticky black substance, and chanted the name of ‘Yog-Sothoth’ so that Betty trembled in her own bed.

Betty’s body deteriorated further, the perennial aches and stiff tendons and burning eyes worsening with each day. Her skin had begun to lose its color, taking on a lighter tint. Veronica was going today to take her to see Pop Tate, who she hoped would recommend she go on to the doctor in Greendale.

But there was one cause for hope amidst all this misery. 

Tonight, Jughead would ride for Arkham. If he was able, he would seize the Necronomicon before Clifford or Penelope could. Then he would return it here for its destruction, which Cheryl assured them would be no simple matter. 

He procured a mount from Mr. Mantle, who bred them, and was willing to loan out a solid black stallion, albeit at exorbitant price (paid for by money Cheryl surreptitiously slipped him). 

Jughead left town with the sun, about an hour before complete darkness sprang up from over the sea. 

Betty and Veronica came to see him off at the Arkham Road junction, a few hundred yards beyond the last of Riverdale’s ramshackle houses. Betty watched him lead the horse along by the bridle, fine face touched by some of his father’s brutal determination. And he would not have appreciated the observation, but she was proud of him. Their first meeting, whenever it might have been, was forever lost to history. He had always been a fixture of her life. Sometimes he was belligerent in his cynicism, or edged near cruelty in his cold humor, or pretended dispassion too strongly. But he was always, Betty was certain, fundamentally decent. He was always quick to help her, he’d comforted her when she was a girl and her parents fought, taken her to swap poetry at the beach, or when they were older, made her laugh with his irreverent pastiches of townsfolk and international titans alike. 

And when he was so called, he never hesitated to do what was good and right. Cheryl was a lucky woman indeed. 

He wrapped his fingers round the horse’s bridle and prepared to hoist himself into the saddle.

Betty offered a brilliant smile. She loved him. She really did. Even through the pain of her fever, she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. On the lips. His back shot up straight and his shoulders squared. Then he returned the embrace, and deepened the kiss. It lasted for a brief moment, the dying sun playing in his eyes. He looked for a moment, regretful and sated. 

Neither said anything.

Veronica stepped forward. She placed the revolver in his hand. Hiram Lodge owned multiple braces of pistols, and Hermione would not miss one iron. It had been agreed that he ought to carry some manner of weapon with him. Though he did not intend to use it on any human beings.

The sky overhead sank towards earth in heavy grey sheets of vapor. Clouds slithered round and through one another, carrying through rills of unshed rain. Deep cracks and groans burst up from the east and rolled across the slate firmament. 

“Storm?” Veronica asked with a rhetorical resignation. “Because we’ve not enough obstacles, clearly.” 

“Arkham’s an hour’s ride at full gallop,” Jughead said. He stroked the horse’s neck. “Assuming the horse cooperates.”

“God bless,” Veronica said. 

“I love you,” Betty said, meekly. 

He nodded once more, and left them with a final request. “Keep an eye on Cheryl, will you? Until I get back.” He did not await an answer, but then dug his heels into the horse’s side and thundered off down the Arkham Road.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” Betty said as he disappeared into the fine glow of the waning sun on the rise. 

“What?”

“Kissed him.” 

“Well, circumstances taken into account…”

* * *

Jughead did not ride often, and he was no expert horseman. It took some minutes for his mount to acclimate itself to a human companion, and more time yet for him to likewise settle into a comfortable position in the saddle. His mastery of the reins was challenged further by the fact that only a mile out of Riverdale, the sky opened up and dropped a Noachian downpour on him. 

He snapped his heels against the stallion’s flanks and urged it on faster. The road was unpaved. The broad hooves stamped deep into the wet, tender earth, and the animal’s legs and belly were caked with mud. So were his boots. 

As he rode he considered the options arrayed before him. The library doubtless would forbid him from carrying off the Necronomicon. So he  _ would  _ have to steal it. But perhaps they would at least grant him to look on the old book, which would afford him the opportunity to make off with it. The pistol at his hip bounced and rattled with every jarring stretch of road. 

The rain struck hard enough that it stung the skin, peppering his bare face and running in little streams through his hair, over the curve of his cheek, through his lips. Cold and dark. Soon the back end of his coat was draped over the horse’s haunches like a second tail. 

A strange and stubborn facet of his mind still refused to accept the reality of this all, and insisted on treating it as a grand game. Retrieve the book! Keep Cthulhu in his tomb! Keep barred the gate of Yog-Sothoth! And victory and the spoils are yours!

Just a game. Just a game. 

It was two hours beyond last light when he reached Arkham at last. It was not a large city, and only just qualified as more than a town. But next to Riverdale, it was a metropolis. The streets glowed by the power of electricity. The buildings were solid concrete or red brick, two or more stories. Even at this late hour, there were pedestrians about. The soft, muddy slopping of horse’s hooves on the dirt road graded into a sharp, clipping beat of stones once he turned onto the first paved avenue. The stallion splashed a puddle. 

Folks watched him ride by, unsure and tense in the saddle. Motor-cars lined the shadows along roadways and alleys. Gentlemen and ladies passed in styles twenty years ahead of Riverdale’s. No grand Edwardian hats or narrowed waistlines. He felt like a relic. 

The rain died off finally. 

Jughead did not come to Arkham often, but he had been, when necessary. And it was the closest to Manhattan, London, or Berlin he was ever likely to get. 

He knew the way to Miskatonic, vaguely. 

Jughead leant down in the horse, shewing as little desperation or frantic haste as he could. He called to the nearest man passing on the street.

“Excuse me, sir! To Miskatonic?” 

The fellow gave him a look. Then he said: “down Lich street two more streets crossways, ’n then take a right!” 

“Thanks.”

Miskatonic was an old building, foundation stones laid in the waning days of the War of 1812. Since then it had contended with Harvard for the brightest and most capable sons of the New England gentry, and had given a good account of itself. 

It was barred by a great black gate, blazoned with a crest enclosing a florid ‘M’. The building beyond stretched out in a vague ‘U’ around the courtyard, in the center of which stood a grand fountain the shape of a writhing dragon. 

The university itself comprised multiple buildings with their sooty black gable roofs, linked to one another by wind-swept open corridors that in these autumn months piled high with leaves and dun water. The caretakers appeared absent or careless, for many an ancient wall of marble languished beneath layers of ivy and creeping roots. 

A thin must crept along the earth, up to the horse’s knees. 

Jughead dismounted and lashed his horse to the gates. They still stood wide open, and so he entered. 

Two policemen, in their drab black uniforms and half-capes, chattered lazily to each other in the shade of a Doric pillar. They fell into a momentary silence as he strolled by. Then he stopped and turned, hoping they were hired as security for the school, or else otherwise acquainted with its layout.

“Excuse me, gentlemen!” he called.

“Ye?”

“I was hoping you could point me to the library!” He pulled the fringe of his coat taut against his leg, concealing the weapon at his hip, for he doubted revolvers were permitted on campus. 

“Library?” said one of the policemen. “Ye see that courtyard through there? Ye head through, take a left, and it’s there next to the statue of Delapore.” 

Jughead nodded his thanks and went on. He followed their instructions, marked the statue of erudite old Delapore holding a quill in one hand and a saber in the other, and came to a low, long building above which was nailed the bronze plaque: MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. 

He swallowed his temerity and pushed inside. 

A wave of dust and the tangy scent of moldering books seized him through the doors. Along swept the warmth of candles and a row of treacherous light bulbs along the ceiling. 

Jughead loved libraries. That was his favorite part of Thornhill, and one of the great sorrows of Riverdale was the lack of such wonderful institutions. He could spend hours meandering among tumbling shelves and rifling through piles of rotting encyclopedias. 

It appeared empty. Then he rounded the little corner of the door’s alcove, and noted the big oak desk pressed against the wall, and the fellow bent over it balancing an antique pen between white, wrinkled fingers. He maintained neat, slick greying hair, though it grew sparse just above the brow and at the temples. The man raised his head, perched atop thin and avian shoulders hunching beneath a grey Victorian coat. His eyes were blue, much lighter than Jughead’s own, and his nose an elegant Roman. 

“May I help you?” he asked with a base courtesy that told his young guest this old man had been little but polite for many years. 

“Ah—I hope so,” Jughead smiled awkwardly. 

The man stood, and approached Jughead possessed with a sort of regal capability that belied his age. 

“Dr. Henry Armitage,” he introduced. “Professor of Classics and Anthropology here at Miskatonic. I am afraid it’s a bit late—“

Jughead did not really digest the last bit of his sentence, for he was busy recovering from the introduction. He was familiar with Armitage, and had in fact devoured two of his books, high praise considering the rigors involved with acquiring new volumes in Riverdale. 

“Dr. Armitage!” Jughead beamed, and for a moment the dire impetus behind his visit was entirely forgotten. “Yes, yes! I’ve read  _ The Last of the Heathens _ , I think the witches’ religion is one of the most interesting hypotheses in current scholarship!”

Armitage smiled tolerantly, and Jughead suspected he would grow more lenient now that he knew he’d met a kindred spirit.

“Ah, well if that interests you, my colleague Ms. Murray is working on a definitive treatment of just that topic!” 

Jughead smiled wider.

“I’ll have to keep an eye out for that.”

“Two things, young man—first off, you are thoroughly drenched and may want to remove your coat. Secondly, what may I call you?”

Jughead’s hand fell without intent to the revolver jammed into his belt. 

“I—I’m fine in the coat. And you can call me Jones, if you like.” 

“Well, Mr. Jones, what brings you to Miskatonic tonight?”

“I guess there’s no point in hemming and hawing—I’m here hoping to take a look at your Necronomicon.” 

Armitage’s sallow cheeks thinned a bit further with that, whether in annoyance, worry, or something else was impossible to tell. 

“The Necronomicon. The…Book of the Dead!” he chuckled, teasing. 

“Yes, sir. I understand you have a Latin edition?” 

“Indeed. Olaus Wormius’ 1609 translation, published in Valladolid that year. Priceless,” Armitage said, with a hint of caution. “Absolutely priceless.” 

“Would you show it to me?”

Armitage wavered for a moment. He raised his weathered knuckles to his lips.

“What do you need with it?” 

“I—“  _ I need to reach it before my mother and father in law do, so as to prevent them from raising a slumbering god of old from the sea and enslaving the human race in perpetuity _ . “I’m deeply curious.” 

“Deep curiosity…” Armitage wagged his finger. “A dangerous affliction.” He clasped his hands. “Is there anything in particular you’re interested in?”

“Anything the book has got to say on…Yog-Sothoth, especially.” 

Armitage nodded. 

“Well, I suppose a moment’s look won’t do much harm.” He motioned for Jughead to follow. “This way.”

He led him among the leaning, overloaded shelves whose wood was probably hewn down two centuries ago. Jughead breathed deep of leather and rust and  _ history _ , and mourned that his situation did not allow him the time to browse and marinate in this place of beauty. 

There was another door in the rear of the library, this one very heavy wood and sealed with thick bands of iron and a stout lock. Armitage sprung it with an old-fashioned skeleton key. 

“Now, the Wormius edition is one of the few extant editions of the Necronomicon in existence,” Armitage spoke as they walked. “Unfortunately, no known copies of al-Hazred’s original survive. However, Wormius is supposed to have worked at least in part from fragments of an old Arabic manuscript brought back from the Levant as plunder during the Third Crusade. So some of the texts in this edition—particularly those pertaining to formulae or ‘spells’ remain in Arabic.”

Jughead nodded along in genuine fascination. He only wished he were here in a truly academic capacity. 

“What can you tell me about Yog-Sothoth?” 

“Yog-Sothoth! Some old heathen god,” Armitage answered. “He is supposed to be greater than the whole of our universe. Outside not only our space but our time. Able to see now, then, and future all at once. Imagine yourself perched over an ant hill. Or perhaps many ant hills. Except for whatever reason, these ant hills are fitted with iron domes, and he has trouble getting through.”

Jughead found the thought immensely disturbing. What would that look like? To be beyond space and time? Eternal? Timeless. Yog-Sothoth over this world would be as a man staring into a painting. And that would make Jughead and all the other ladies and gentlemen on the earth the painted. He imagined himself as such. A collection of slathered pigments. Stiff and without life. A poor artifice in imitation of reality. Crude and laughable before the real flesh and blood connoisseurs who beheld him. 

Absolutely powerless. 

Perhaps in the painting he would be reaching, or speaking. But he would not be, really. Pigment and canvas could not reach or speak. He would be only a dim reflection of the truly existent. 

And that was him and all the world before Yog-Sothoth. 

What could the subjects of the painting do if one decided he wished to burn the painting?

He shivered.

“What does some great, incomprehensible divinity want with our puny universe, anyways?”

Armitage shrugged.

"Who can say? If I had to venture a guess, I would say it’s much as when you want something from the top shelf of your pantry. It’s hardly a matter of life or death, but you’re willing to expend a bit of effort getting it down.”

The glib comparison, that all the world, with its millions of souls, and even beyond, through the galaxies and black stretches of cosmic vacancy to the brink of the universe itself, could ever be little more than a jar of preserves in a pantry, filled him with deep and basic dread.

“You understand,” Armitage continued. “I hope you aren’t getting the impression I  _ believe  _ any of this. I’m simply speaking as an academic.”

“Of course, of course,” Jughead said, and laughed with little light.

Armitage led him into a much smaller room, this one lined with only three shelves, one against each wall, save the one that led out into the library’s primary chamber. The professor crossed the room to the far shelf, and ran his finger along the battered old spines and their faded lettering. At last he selected a massive tome, about two feet tall and nearly half that in thickness. With considerable effort and visible strain, Armitage hauled the Necronomicon off of its shelf. Jughead took note of his struggle, and hoped it owed only to the man’s age, and that he himself would not have any trouble running off with it when the time came.

Armitage brought them back out into the library’s central rooms. He laid the hidebound, awful book down on a sturdy table overlooked by a regimented line of candles. Jughead loomed over his shoulder, breaths sharp and heady. 

“May I—“ Jughead asked.

“Go ahead.”

Jughead gingerly took hold of the cover’s corner. The binding itself was ancient, black leather, inscribed all around with ghastly lines and figures suggesting wriggling tendrils, or perhaps a section of slimy dark stone. He wanted to gag merely looking on it.

But he gathered his courage and opened it to the first page.

_ El Necronomicon _ , read the heavy gothic print across the margins.  _ El Libro de los Muertos _ .

_ Traducido de Grieco a Latin por Olaus Wormius _

Only these initial notes and markings were in Spanish, and Wormius’ prefatory note was in Low German. The rest was Latin. 

“You said some of the original Arabic is preserved here,” Jughead said. “Could you show it to me?” 

Armitage dutifully turned several hundred pages into the devilish volume. And he delivered him to a page headed with a Latin preface. Jughead could read none of it of course, save one word:  _ Ioc-Sotot  _

Beneath it was a page’s worth of horrible, spidery Arabic that shewed none of the beauty expected from calligraphy of that tongue. The lines were sharp and twisting, winding together and then rending apart so cruelly he could nearly hear the words split. It looked like the desperate, tortured scribblings of a man only one pen stroke from utter madness. This, Jughead imagined, is what a book might look like were it truly inspired by a god. No soft comfort, no accommodation of man’s petty weals and woes. No, this was the result when a power—an  _ intelligence _ —wildly beyond the frontiers of human understanding gripped a poor and luckless mortal tight, and used him carelessly as an instrument to record what men had no right to know.

“What does it say?” Jughead asked, aware he was careful of drawing breaths all the way to the bottom of his throat.

“Well, my Arabic is nowhere near my Latin or Greek, but…it’s a formula. An incantation for your…Yog-Sothoth.” And he began to read, halting, which made it all the more dreadful. “ _ Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again…” _

Jughead felt the reptilian horror creep in the marrow of his bones.

“And then what?” Jughead asked. “Once the Old Ones break through? Once Yog-Sothoth is here? Then what? The enslavement of mankind? I—“

Armitage read on.

“The word here is not ‘enslave’ but…’destroy’. The end of all flesh.” 

Jughead turned to look on the old man with horrible, stricken eyes.

“My boy,” Armitage said weirdly. “You don’t go in for any of this silliness, do you?”

“No!” Jughead answered, too quick. “No, of course not. I just—it  _ is  _ a bit eerie, no?” 

“Indeed.” Armitage went on. “ _ of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them…Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.” _

_ “ _ Stop!” Jughead demanded. Armitage turned to him, and almost swept over a candlestick in the swift twist of his neck. The old man’s face was sallow and nearly skeletal in the ghostly light. “Stop,” Jughead repeated. “What is that—‘ _ those They have begotten on mankind’ _ ?” 

“I suppose it means the children of Old Ones and of human women? You’re familiar with the Nephilim of the Hebrew scripture?” 

He recalled something he had read in Gerard’s book, that night at the Cooper house. That Yog-Sothoth was called upon to make fertile what was barren, amidst thunder and lightning. His stomach turned. A strange and terrible thought seeped into his mind. He brutally tore it aside. 

Jughead sputtered. What he said next he was too forward with. “Dr. Armitage…I need to borrow that book.” 

“Pardon me?” 

He stretched a hand towards the Necronomicon, loathsome as it was to do so. 

“I—may I borrow the book, please?”

“You’re joking with me. This is an invaluable artifact, lad.”

“I need it,” Jughead nearly gasped, feeling as if he was sinking into the sea and taking oceans into his lungs. God, how far behind him could the Blossoms be?

“I’m afraid I can’t do that. I—young man, are you alright?”

“I’m sorry about this, professor.” Jughead reached into his coat and drew the revolver. He leveled it at the old man’s chest. Armitage took a step back. Jughead clicked the hammer for effect. Then he reached forward and snatched up the Necronomicon. He tucked it under his arm. It was terribly heavy for a book, he might have guessed it at seven pounds. But he could run with it, if barely. 

“My boy,” Armitage said in his grave scholar’s voice. “I assure you, this isn’t worth it.”

“With all due respect, professor,” Jughead responded. “I assure you, it is.”

And then he backed out of the library, keeping the weapon trained on Armitage until he reached the doors. Then he threw them open and hurtled out into the fog-choked evening, head bent low into the breeze, the revolver in his right hand and the Necronomicon gripped firmly in the left. He raced along, laden with purpose and fury, and what few alumni were still about scattered like leaves as he tore past. 

Jughead thundered by the two policemen at the gate. They were broken out of their simple talk, for one of them noticed the gun in his hand and the book in the other.

“‘Ey!” barked one of the men.

Jughead paid him no heed, rounded the gate, and sprinted for his horse, which grew restless at the post. The two policemen rushed behind, waving madly. They closed the distance quick, and thirty meters shrank to fifteen. Jughead raised the pistol high in the air and discharged it. The round whipped off into the black sky and never came near his two pursuers. But the report of the weapon was loud enough to arouse their instincts, and they fell to the ground and froze. The split second’s fright gave Jughead the time he needed to undo the stallion’s tether, gain the saddle, and gallop away down the stony streets of Arkham, the constables howling in his wake.

* * *

After Jughead’s departure for Arkham, Betty and Veronica went home. Or at least, they attempted. But the rain grew pitiless and the winds reached such velocities that leafless boughs snapped from their trunks and the ocean overflowed the docks. 

The fisherman lashed their boats tight in the harbor, and prayed to God they would still be seaworthy when the tempest had passed. No one had reported a storm out at sea. No one had noticed the signs that normally presaged such a storm. It was an odd phenomenon, as if it had sprung fully formed from the air and then borne down on Riverdale with vile and particular intent. 

They reached the Riverdale Register already drenched, the rain so loud it very nearly resembled musket volleys. 

Alice Cooper was inside, at the kitchen table, staring dead through the window and into the rain. In Polly’s room, the girls could hear her giggling and moaning, and occasionally chanting her arcane slogans. 

There was silence from Hal Cooper’s room.

“Mother?” Betty asked, carefully.

Alice did not respond. She continued her blind peering into the storm.

Betty touched Veronica’s arm.

“Is it okay if Veronica spends the night?” she asked. “She doesn’t want to walk home in this.”

After a long silence, Alice turned to her daughter. Betty saw there were tears drying on her cheeks. She did not know if she ought to ask what troubled her. In the end, she decided, no.

“Sure,” Alice said. And then she repositioned herself to better watch the rain.

The two young women shared Betty’s bed, huddling close while the building storm pounded at the house’s weakening walls. 

Betty was in ever worse pain, and hoped to God the rain would let up enough she could go see Pop Tate in the morning. And besides that, she was dreadfully worried for Jughead. How long ought she to give before she began assuming something terrible had happened? What if the Blossoms had gotten the book already? What if—

“Betty,” Veronica whispered. Polly moaned and laughed from the next room. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Betty said. But then she smiled. “Not yet.”

“It’ll all be okay,” Veronica said, smoothing her friend’s flaxen hair. “I swear.” 

When they woke up in the morning, the winds had died down some. But the ceiling of wooly grey clouds was not lifted, and the sun still shut off from the world. Light was dim and sparse, and there was still a steady rain, even if it was not the monsoon of the night before.

Before either of Betty’s parents or Polly awakened (not that anyone but Alice would be getting out of bed), the two girls dressed and slipped out of the house, holding coats up over their head while the sky beat down on them. 

Betty’s thighs and the soles of her feet began to ache, and threatened to support her weight no longer. The rashes on her neck were nearing something like folds of excess skin, rippling in a neat pattern, parallel slashes down the width of her throat. The colorless tint of her drained skin lightened very nearly to blue. Her eyes were perpetually dry and pained.

They arrived at Pop’s eatery and Betty shambled inside, Veronica holding her by the arm. 

Pop Tate turned round behind his counter, and when he saw his customers his expression lightened.

“Ladies! Can’t believe you’re out in  _ this _ !” 

“Can’t believe you’re open for  _ business  _ in  _ this _ ,” Veronica retorted.

“Fair enough! But…I  _ do  _ live here.” 

“I’m not here for…” Betty croaked. “I really don’t feel well. I was hoping you could check me out.”

Tate appraised her and frowned in evident agreement. 

“Why don’t you come on back?”

Betty gratefully followed him into the kitchen, Veronica trailing after. Pop Tate removed his apron. Betty sank with dreadful sloth into a chair for sitting too quickly would irritate her tender flesh. Veronica rubbed her shoulder, just light enough that it would not hurt. 

Pop Tate knelt in front of her. She gave him a curt explanation of her symptoms, and how long they had lasted. 

“Are these rashes on your neck?” he asked.

“I—I  _ think  _ so,” Betty answered.

“They look more like  _ scars _ ,” said Pop, eyes consternated. 

“I don’t know where they came from,” Betty truthfully said. For she did not. She tried to move through the panic that gripped her chest tight. On top of all that had stricken her and her friends, now she had some rare disease she could not identify? 

“Your eyes,” asked Pop Tate. “Do they hurt?” 

“Yes,” Betty answered. “It feels like it’s a bit hard to close them, sometimes.” 

He nodded. 

“And you say you feel sore? Everywhere.” 

“Yes,” she groaned. “It’s almost getting hard to walk.” 

“Mmmm,” Pop Tate grumbled, face cloudy with undirected thought. “I can’t say I can figure out just what’s wrong with you, Betty,” he said. “I—I’m sorry. I think you’d better see the doctor in Greendale.”

Betty’s big green eyes, wide and dry as they were, welled up with tears. 

“You don’t have  _ any  _ idea?”

Pop Tate looked down at his wide, aged hands, as if they might provide a diagnosis. 

“I’m afraid not. I can guess some kind of fever or illness of the muscles, maybe. But that’s all I can say.” He looked at her with true, deep-felt concern. “I’m sorry, Elizabeth.” 

She inclined her head, thankful as she was frightened.

“Thank you anyways. I’ll try to get to Greendale when I can.” She allowed a moment’s silence. “But I don’t think I’ll trust him as much as you. I mean, you saved my grandfather, right?” 

Pop Tate smiled, wistful and ancient. 

“Yes, indeed. You know, he gave me the bullet I pulled out of him as a souvenir. Still got it somewhere back here, too. He was a good man.” A pause. “When he drowned, it was a blow to all of us.” 

“My grandfather Billy didn’t drown,” Betty interjected. The last sentence had slid its way between her ribs like a dagger. Her heart lost its rhythm and adopted a wild and angry cadence that threatened to tear open her chest. 

“N—no,” Pop Tate spoke, with the minute suggestion in his voice that perhaps he  _ was  _ mistaken, as age took its toll. But when he repeated himself, there was not a jot of doubt in the words. “No, I’m quite sure. I recall the day. I’ll never forget it. I always only wished they’d been able to bury him.”

“Betty—“ Veronica tried to say.

Betty heaved and gasped. A thousand disparate thoughts and suspicions and submerged terrors exploded to the fore and assembled in her mind’s eye. She remembered Rose Blossom’s terrific story. She looked down at her pale, colorless arm, almost ocean blue in its sickly shade. Except it wasn’t ocean blue, was it? It was  _ green _ !

The deep rashes—more like gashes, now—on the sides of her neck almost fluttered. 

“Oh my God,” she moaned, nearly vomiting. “Oh my God!”

Then she leapt to her feet and rushed out into the street.

* * *

Jughead left Arkham in his wake quickly as he could. But quickly as he could was not so quickly. He would have figured it at about 2:00 AM by the time he found his way out of the old city’s cramped grey brick alleys. He was afraid to travel by the same principal road that had delivered him to Arkham earlier that evening. True, he was only now a petty thief. But he’d pettily robbed a priceless artifact from Miskatonic University. That might be worth a picket on the main road out of town.

So he decided to ride by a roundabout route on his way home. He wheeled north and then south again, circuitously avoiding the initial stretch of highway just outside Arkham. This detour took him an extra two hours, slow as he moved, for his horse was still weary from the first ride, and the crazed gallop he’d led the policemen on. 

It was pushing past 4:00 when Jughead finally emerged back onto the road that would lead him home to Riverdale, and with any touch of fortune, the conclusion of this dread nightmare. 

As he rode, the Necronomicon tucked against the saddle, he allowed himself to glory some in the day’s accomplishment. The US Army draft board might have deemed him unfit to tote a rifle, but here he was, a greater champion than any wind-up trooper in Pershing’s legions. Assuming of course, that this was not all a bout of some collective madness afflicting himself and his friends, then he might very well have rescued the world from alien slavery with this wild adventure. 

The rain resumed its crashing downpour as he traveled eastward and back towards the sea. The Essex countryside rambled along on either shoulder of the road, grey and lifeless fields wilting under the autumn Atlantic breezes, interrupted here and again with the skeletal remains of once-trees. With every rise or dip, a herd of emaciated cows would low and gaze mournfully at the passing horseman. Wind beaten farmhouses that had once been painted stood at odd angles from the highway, with little care for the aesthetic.

It was nearly comforting, except that the black book nestled against the saddle horn pervaded the countryside all around with a deep and bleak evil heavier than whatever eerie echo it already possessed. 

But he just needed to move, and all would turn out alright. Raindrops dribbled over the reprehensible leather skin of the evil tome. 

Perhaps two hours from sunlight remained when he spotted the second rider. He crested the next hill in the road, slumped over on his mount, swaying and insecure in his saddle. Jughead drew the revolver again, though he did not truly expect he would need its services again. Or he dearly begged heaven he would not. 

The man moved with some furtive exigency, but his horse was not disposed towards flight, and he could only force the animal past plodding. Jughead drew nearer, the hooves of his great stallion mashed the mud beneath them. 

He began to sketch out the figure of the other rider in his mind. It was another man, that much was clear. Broad-shoulders and a stout trunk, wide arms beneath a wrinkled shirt. No coat, despite the dripping and blowing shower. There was so little moonlight that even at a distance of some thirty feet Jughead could make out very little.

“Lo!” he called.

“Oh,  _ coc y gath _ !” cried the other horseman, and Jughead nearly went sprawling into the thick, muddy soup of the road. 

It was FP.

“Father?” he demanded.

“Great God,” FP moaned. “Clifford told me she’d have sent someone—but th—you have it, already? Of course you do! That’s my boy!” FP dismounted. Something glinting and edged slid into his hand, and Jughead marked the old knife his father carried without fail. 

“Stay back,” Jughead warned, and he maneuvered the horse backwards a step or two. But the animal grew anxious and overtaxed by the sudden stop after all that riding, chomped at its bridle, and in the end he dismounted, too. He held the revolver at his side, drawing back the hammer, because it was an old single action. 

The rain ran over their faces and plastered their shirts to their skin. 

“Give me the book,” FP’s dark order. He held the blade out, long and curving, towards his own son. 

Jughead could not bring himself to aim the pistol yet. 

“No. I don’t think I will,” he responded.

“You don’t understand,” FP said. 

“Oh, I think I understand,” Jughead said, bile burning in his chest and collecting at the base of his throat. “You’re working for Clifford Blossom. Have been all along, probably.” He scoffed. “Christ, you really don’t have a goddamned line in the sand, do you? What, did he promise to make  _ you  _ a god, too?”

FP shook his head. He raised his arms and braced himself as if for a fight, which inspired no confidence in his son. Now Jughead found the mettle to raise the revolver and level it directly at FP’s chest. It hardly gave the man pause. 

“You don’t understand, boy,” he hissed. “Clifford Blossom is a bastard, yes, bu—“

“But  _ what _ ?”

“He’s not the worst one out there. Not anymore. He sent me here to destroy that evil goddamned thing!” he gestured to the Necronomicon, still crushed up against the saddle on Jughead’s horse.

“Bullshit! He and Penelope want it for themselves! You told me so yourself! You told me they wanted to rule like gods alongside their old ones!” 

“Yeah,” FP concurred. The two circled each other broadly, knife and pistol. “Yeah, they did. Before they figured out they’d been swindled.” 

“Swindled? By who?”

“By those things of theirs! Their… _ Great Old Ones _ ! And that chief of all those devils, that thing what they called the great god Yog-Sothoth!” 

“Uh huh,” Jughead kept him talking, praying the rain would not ruin the powder in his gun. “How’s that?” 

“The plan was never—those things were never going to share their throne with a bunch of apes like us, Jug. If Cthulhu wakes again, and that gate opens, and Yog and all his little gods come through, they’re going to clean off the earth. Not enslave it. Wipe it clear.  _ Everything _ .” 

“Fine,” Jughead responded, holding the gun on FP. And in truth, enjoying some of the power over the man. “So then what’s the issue? If the Blossoms’ve seen the error of their ways, and they’re not going to open the gate, then no damned problem, is there? Who  _ else _ is going to open the damn gate?”

“The Blossoms ain’t the only ones who worship those damned things,” FP said. “You remember the cultists? On the ship? They’ve got groups of them all over the fucking world!” 

“Maybe you’ve actually bought that bastard Clifford’s lies. But I don’t think so. I think  _ you’re _ lying,” Jughead said, only just able to contain tears. “All you’ve ever done is lie. And you’re lying now. I think you know damn well what he intends to do with this book, and I think you just don’t care. Or worse, you  _ want  _ him to open that fucking gate. And if you come a step closer, or go for it, I  _ will  _ shoot you.”

“I don’t have time for this,” FP hissed. He stepped forward. Jughead didn’t fire. “Give me the damned book, boy!” 

“No!” 

“God knows I haven’t always done right. Not by you. Not by a lot of people. But I’ll be goddamned if I let the whole world go to hell over this. Give it to me!” 

“No!”

FP lunged at him. He slashed—actually  _ slashed— _ with the damned knife. Jughead heard his sleeve rip, and felt the knife slice into his skin, ignite a burning wound from his shoulder to his elbow and blood trickled out over the lapel of his coat, dissolving in the rainwater. His father tried to shove past him, going for the book on the saddle. Jughead’s horse whinnied and reared up, and the Necronomicon went tumbling into the mud. FP dove for it. Jughead checked him with a shoulder and sent him to the ground. He kicked the book aside, out of his father’s reach. FP scrambled to his feet and threw himself at his son again. This time Jughead saw the knife coming for his gut. He leapt aside and the knife sang past him. FP grabbed his son by the leg of a trouser and dragged him down into the mud. Jughead socked his father in the chest. It hardly phased him, and FP hit him back, and his jaw crunched. The knife swung up into the rain-seeded air, and ripped back down. And Jughead did not know if FP would merely hold the weapon to his throat and demand the book again, or if he really meant to kill him here and now. But as the blade dipped closer and time contracted into this frozen instant, he was not willing to wait for the answer. So he pressed the muzzle of the revolver into his father’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The report interrupted those intermittent and frightful peals of thunder. FP seized up like something had gripped him from inside. He toppled forward, still gripping his knife. Jughead threw the man off of him.

FP fell back in the mud, wheezing and gasping as the rain spattered his worn face and his natty waistcoat. The knife tumbled from his fingers. 

And Jughead realized now what he had done. He jammed the pistol back into his belt. A surge of terror blasted into his spirit, coupled with singular  _ confusion  _ at the violent brawl of the last thirty seconds. How could this be? How had it all come to this?

He fell to his knees in the mud, at his father’s side. 

“Jugh—Jug.”

“Father! I—were you going to—oh my God! I’ve—“

“Jug,” FP moaned, weakly. He could see the bullet had torn through just below his heart. The blood poured profusely over his chest, running in streams alongside the rain and down into the mud.

“I—how bad is—were you going to kill m—“

“Jug,” FP gasped again. “For God’s sake, for once, listen to me:” He took another rattling breath. “That girl of yours—“ And he said nothing else. Just a few more shallow, bloody gasps. And then he was dead.

“Oh  _ Christ _ ! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” 

He’d slain a man. He’d taken aim—at point blank range—with a revolver and he’d triggered the weapon and  _ killed  _ a man. Killed his  _ father _ . By his hand was all that blood discoloring the drizzly puddles. By his hand his father had ceased to breathe.

Good God, he had never  _ despised  _ the man. Not to this extent. Not to see him like this, with his eyes blue and glazed and staring towards the imminent sunrise, but staring thence forever. 

Jughead wanted to vomit. 

But he’d had no  _ choice _ . FP had come at him with a knife! What if he’d killed him? How could he know that he wouldn’t have? He could not. He’d done what he had to do. And what if he had given him the book? Allowed him to take it back to Clifford Blossom? No matter what FP’s intentions were, Clifford’s could be nothing but vile and self-serving. 

He had done what fate and fortune had left him no choice but to do. He was not guilty, he said to himself as the guilt howled and beat away at his heart and his guts and the walls of his skull. 

The Necronomicon remained half-sunken into the muddy quagmire of the road, filthy water leeching into its venerable pages and running over the eerie leather binding. He could not bring himself to retrieve it. Not in the moment. 

Both his and his father’s horses whinnied, awaiting their riders. One would wait forever. 

Jughead gripped his face with both his hands, clawing at his tender cheeks. What?  _ What _ ? He’d never wanted so much as a particle of this madness. 

He knelt by his father’s cooling corpse, drenched red and in the dull brown of the earth. He knelt by the side of the road, feeling his knees carve out gullies for themselves in the yielding dirt. He wept into his hands, and the warm tears froze under the impartial storm and then lost themselves in the trickling rain that soaked what was not soaked and drowned what already was. 

* * *

Clifford and Penelope Blossom stepped in through the doors of their grand old seaside manor, wild with desperation. Wild with the premonition of impending defeat and ruin. And by what hands?

How ironic!

“He should be there by now, no?” Clifford asked his wife, his sturdy voice bereft of power.

“God willing,” Penelope almost laughed. She was always one to approach the direst of matters with a glib laugh and a sadistic derision. 

“It’s too late, Clifford. Of that, I can assure you.” 

The two craned their heads up to find Cheryl perched at the head of the stairs, one dainty white hand curling over the banister, the other on her hip. 

“Goddamn you, girl!” Penelope shouted. 

At that, Clifford drew a pistol and pointed it at said girl. 

Cheryl hardly flinched; only a slight flutter of those dark, yet luminous eyes. 

“No need for all that,” she said. “No one likes a bitter loser.” She sashayed down the steps. She laughed. “You think we’ve been playing some great game of chess, when the truth is I’ve been erasing the squares.” 

Clifford drew back the hammer on his already cocked revolver.

“I  _ will  _ kill you.”

Then another voice, just out of sight and up across the second floor.

“Oh, I wouldn’t if I were you.”

And there was another footstep on the stair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Miskatonic has a serious problem with weird kids from provincial towns breaking in and trying to steal cursed eldritch tomes


	7. heredity

Jughead rode through the cracking dawn, thankful the rain still fell with enough vigor to wash away his tears. The Necronomicon was back in the saddle, stained all over with mud and rendered pliably soft with rainwater.

He’d  _ killed  _ his father. Shot him dead.

The man had come at him with a knife. It was his life or the other. But what if FP hadn’t intended to kill him? What if—

Jughead blew the brooding pensiveness aside as he rode. No time. 

What had his father meant to tell him?

The last words to slip from his whiskey-soaked tongue.

“ _ That girl of yours—“ _

What?

Was there an inkling of truth in anything he said? That Clifford had sent him to  _ destroy  _ the book?

No. That couldn’t be so. If Clifford really meant to be rid of the Necronomicon rather than press it into service, then why did Cheryl adamantly insist otherwise? Why was Jason dead?

Jughead’s father was a liar to the end. He was working for the Blossoms, happy to trade in the future of humanity for a bit of coin. That was all. And he had done a good deed in killing him and leaving his corpse by the shoulder of the churning highway, hurt as it might. 

He swept down the Arkham Road and back into Riverdale, and in another ten minutes reined in his horse before the black gate of Thornhill. It hung wide open as it rarely did. That was enough to trigger his deep-seated animal caution. Something was off.

Perhaps Clifford and Penelope were expecting him? Yes. If they had sent FP after the book and after Jughead, then they knew Cheryl had sent  _ him  _ after the book. A heap of lead built up in his stomach. What if they were waiting? What would they have done to Cheryl by now?

He dismounted the horse and hurried up the stony walkway to the front doors. But then he halted. There was a trail of footprints winding down from the steps, over the path, and disappearing at the threshold of the gate, out into Riverdale. Footprints left in blood. He knelt, heart weak and twitching. They were small. A woman’s shoes.  _ Cheryl _ .

Jughead raised his head to the big oaken doors. They, too, stood ajar. Jughead swallowed, his courage sapped. He drew the revolver again. And thrust his way into the house.

And there, in the foyer, just at the foot of the grand staircase, he spied them. 

Cheryl knelt low to the ground, over the prone body of her father. His shirt and waistcoat lay in tatters, the flesh below similarly ravaged. Muscle, bone, and tissue gleamed in the morning sunlight pouring in the dusty windows. Cheryl plunged the wicked silver dagger into Clifford’s breast once more, and drew it out with a sound like sucking mud. 

He realized the footprints on the way outside could not have been hers. Rather, they were Penelope’s. 

Jughead stepped away, half-arrested in his movements by the grisliness of the sight set before his face. Cheryl stood, and let the blade clatter to the ground. Her pale, fine hands dripped vicious red. She was still dressed in a fine white bed dress, barefoot. It was splattered all over now with that warm, bodily scarlet. Her copper hair was tousled wild. It looked like she’d just risen for the morning, and happened to be struck with a touch of bloodlust as one was with a craving for hot cakes. 

“Forsythe! Jughead!” she exclaimed. As if he ought to be glad to catch this sight. And then she saw the book clutched in his left arm. “You’ve done it! My latter day knight-errant!” Cheryl spread her blood-washed arms, to pull him in for a gory embrace.

“What have you done?” Jughead demanded.

Cheryl waved a dismissive hand towards the corpse.

“He would have done the same to me, first.” She strode towards her fiancé. “You have that dread book? Give it to me!”

“You’re going to destroy it,” Jughead said, less a question than an ejaculation of quickly waning hope.

“Of course,” Cheryl said, and her lips and tongue moved with such practiced fluidity that he nearly believed her. But then he looked down to her stomach, and he swore her gravid belly had grown three weeks' worth in the two days since she’d revealed to him her pregnancy. He was no medical man. But from what books of human anatomy he’d read, and simple folk wisdom, he knew well enough: that was not possible. 

_ Human  _ anatomy. 

“That’s not my child,” he said, straining his dry and aching throat. His eyes were still puffed up with tears. “That’s not my child.”

She covered her stomach, protective.

“Who else’s might it be?”

“I don’t—“

Then he looked up at her brow. There was a little scratch there. It must have been sustained at her father’s hand, he presumed, as she carved him apart. In fact, he was surprised there had not been a greater struggle. Cheryl was a slight girl, and Clifford a large man. She ought to have been covered in bruises and lacerations. 

But the scratch was there, nonetheless, weeping dark blood. Except it wasn’t blood. It was something thicker, perhaps of a kind with oil or gelatin. And it was black, save for the streaks of sickly green running through. The ghoulish ichor dripped down Cheryl’s temple and gathered in clumps along her jawline. 

Jughead recognized it just fine. It was the stuff Polly had expelled with her vomit. It was the hellish slime that caked the walls of R’lyeh in his stygian nightmares.

And then it all smashed together like a million threads in a broad tapestry converging at last into one loathsome entirety. 

_ Cheryl Blossom, Jason Blossom, born 1898. _

He remembered what Pop Tate had told them that night at the eatery.

_ Hasn’t rained or thundered this bad since ’98. _

That little notation in the Necronomicon, in the awful, scratchy Arabic. 

_ Those the Old Ones have begotten on mankind, amidst the thunder and the lightning.  _

And the last terrible thread, his father’s final blood-choked words. And he saw much too late that it had been the first half of a warning.

“ _ That girl of yours—“  _

_ That girl of yours. It's not Clifford— _ she’s  _ the one who needs the book. _

“Oh my God,” Jughead moaned. He clutched the Necronomicon to his chest, and the pistol in the other. “What the hell are you?” he demanded, though he knew full well the answer. And knew full well that he’d been played for a goddamned fool.

“I’m actually not quite sure,” Cheryl said, sweetly.

Footfalls in the dining room, off to the right. Heavy. Boots against polished oak.

And in strode Jason Blossom. He might never have died. The flesh of his face, eaten away by the scuttling vermin of the sea, was restored in full. His cheeks were just a bit ruddy. His eyes were blue, narrow and perceptive, like they’d always been. His hands hung loosely at his sides, the right scraping a revolver in its holster.

Jughead tried to speak but found his faculties paralyzed. His tongue wagged in impotence against the roof of his mouth. He called into question his own eyes. And he leveled his pistol at the walking impossibility. 

“You’re dead,” he at last prevailed to spit, with such a gruff, pretended certainty, as if he thought the words might lay Jason back in his grave. 

“I am he that liveth,” Jason said, and he took a moment to examine his right hand, as if he was amazed as anyone else to find himself here. “And was dead. And behold, I am alive forevermore!” He spread his hands wide and laughed. 

Jughead ignored the cheeky blasphemy.

“You’re  _ dead _ ,” he insisted.

Jason came up behind his sister, and slid his arms around her stomach.. She smiled peacefully, smoky dark eyes sweet and contented. Then he slid his finger under her chin and coaxed her to face him, and they kissed each other, with much passion and gentle ardor. It was no fraternal kiss. 

“Your parents aren’t—“ Jughead charged. “Your mother and father  _ aren’t  _ your mother and father, are they?” 

“Penelope is our mother, indeed,” Cheryl said. “But you’re right on one count. The poor fellow over there wearing his entrails,” she gestured to Clifford’s mutilated corpse across the room. The congealing blood loosely traced the contours of his body, and then deformed into a shapeless puddle, and leached into the old wood. “Is our very own cut-rate Joseph of Nazareth. Our Father in body and spirit—“

“Yog-Sothoth,” Jughead finished, teeth clenched to stem the chattering. 

Jason clapped with languid, cruel amusement.

“Bravo, Holmes!” 

“Did you  _ ever _ die?” he demanded of Jason.

“For a time,” Cheryl answered in her brother’s stead “But that is not dead which can eternal lie.”

Jason picked up the latter half of the couplet. “And in strange aeons, even death may die.” 

Jughead retreated towards the wide open door. 

Jason extended a hand.

“Give us the book, Jones.”

“What, so you can throw the gate wide open for your Father? I don’t think so.” 

“Now, now,” Cheryl chided. “You’re in  _ our  _ house.” She held out her own grasping hand for the book. “Be a good guest, darling.” 

Jughead laughed, miserable and lost.

“I’m a damned idiot. Good God, I’m an idiot.  _ This  _ is why you needed a husband, isn’t it?” Jughead pointed the pistol to Cheryl’s stomach. “To present a  _ legitimate  _ father for…” He looked Jason in the eye. The man’s—or whatever he was—face burned with hatred and murder, and also wild envy. And collected, these hard sentiments bloomed into an inhuman excitement. 

“Yes,” Cheryl admitted. “That’s true.”

“Why  _ me _ ?” Jughead demanded. The tears slipped down his hot, ruddy cheeks. “Why—“

“Take it as a compliment, Jughead,” Cheryl said, and the tilt of her voice was nearly regretful. “Of all the men in this dreadful little backwater, I took you for the most tolerable.” 

Jason tired of the conversation, pulled his revolver, aimed it over his sister’s shoulder. Jughead looked down the barrel. And he aimed his own gun. 

“Give me the damned Necronomicon,” Jason ordered. 

“Come and take it.”

Then in the moment of his final syllable, Jughead turned and bounded off, out through the open door, across the leeward lawn of Thornhill.

“Goddammit!” 

The gun fired. A bullet smacked into the earth about five feet to his right. A light spray of dust flecked his legs. Another gunshot. This one went over his head. He managed to scramble into the saddle of his horse. The animal shrieked and bucked in naked terror. 

Jason followed quick on Jughead’s heels, firing the weapon blindly in the general direction of his quarry until the cylinder exhausted. 

Jughead kicked the horse in the sides and flew.

* * *

Betty rushed headlong through the black streets of Riverdale. Her mind was near gone. The human spirit is only calibrated to suffer so much abuse, to absorb so much damage, before it fractures at the base, and the resultant shards reduce the thin fabric of sanity to tatters. And she was on the verge of that ultimate rupture.

Veronica staggered behind her, begging her friend to slow. She could not hear. She could not think on anything except the grotesque history falling together.

Elizabeth Cooper’s grandfather—her father’s father—was (or  _ had  _ been) called William Cooper. She had never known him—he’d died when Harold Cooper was four years old. 1870

But then Grandmother Rose relayed her awful tale. And she claimed that her brother Edward, at the behest of their tyrant father, wedded one of the fish-creatures at Hangman’s Reef. And that he even sired children with the mermaid. And that this son was called William. A William precisely the right age to render his lifespan and the lifespan of  _ Betty’s  _ Grandfather William coterminous. 

Yet any fears so inspired were headed off, because Rose said William—her nephew William—had ‘died’ sometime in his thirties. That he was thought drowned off of Sweetwater Beach. But he had never died, Rose said. He’d changed, lost his humanity, and gone under the sea to be with his brothers and sisters in the great cities of the Deep Ones.

But that was no cause for concern, because Betty’s Grandfather William had died of fever.  _ Hadn’t  _ he?

But now Pop Tate claimed that William— _ her  _ Grandfather William— had  drowned.

Oh God…

Veronica bounded along, pleading for Betty to wait.

She rounded the corner and charged towards the Register. Her fingers curled round the doorknob. “Mother!” Betty ventured to call, before she’d even gotten the door open. “Father!” 

No answer was forthcoming. But from within the building came a dreadful shrieking, and even worse, a sort of guttural mumbling. Betty’s skin, flushing pale and green, prickled with gooseflesh. 

She threw the door open. 

And screamed at the scene before her. 

Alice Cooper lay propped against the far wall. Splotches of angry red discolored the broad waist of the white cotton dress. She was breathing, but only with much effort. Blood trickled similarly from her parted lips. 

Yet this was not the worst.

In the center of the room, against the toppled table and amidst scattered scraps of bread and shattered eggs, Polly Cooper struggled mightily with her assailant, a hulking figure in a long black coat. She kicked desperately at the brute’s legs and chest, but in her heavily pregnant state could do little to stave off his attack. She screamed louder than Betty imagined human lungs could produce. 

The mystery figure grunted and howled as he fought for a good grip on the girl.

“Hey!” Betty called with a courage so stout and shockingly martial that it was foreign to her. “Get away from her!” 

The man turned, and Betty clapped eyes on his face.

It was her father.

Or it had been, at least. 

The skin of his cheeks, his brow, had melted into a thin, watery green. Hideous, saurian scutes began to creep across the man’s features, over the bridge of his nose, his chin. Up to his temples. The patches of pure human skin already grew thick and mottled, in preparation for their becoming scales. Harold Cooper’s lips hung apart, thick and rubbery, black and green, like the mouth of a grouper. His eyes had lost most of their color, shifted into a cloudy grey with no iris and a great, flat pupil. And his  _ neck _ . Along his neck ran the fissures that were quick opening into fluttering gills. The flaps twitched as he moved, revealing the red, fibrous flesh beneath. Each breath he took was a labor, for his body would soon beg its oxygen from the sea. 

Betty nearly vomited. Veronica screamed. 

The Deep One that had been her father forgot Polly and advanced on her. He closed a slimy, greening hand around her forearm. Betty roared with determination, misery, and terror, and she snatched up the coat rack two feet from the door and slammed it against Hal’s head. He stumbled back, moaning and burbling with a throat no longer made for human speech. As he righted himself for another attack, Veronica sprung forward and cracked him in the spine with a frying pan. Hal bellowed as no human should be able. He swung one twisted fist into Veronica’s gut and sent her hard into the far wall. She struck it hard and fell to the ground.

“Veronica!” Betty called, but there was little opportunity to assist her, because then the Deep One wrapped a hand around her throat. Betty felt the slopping, rubbery digits press tight into her neck. She gazed into the cloudy, icthyian eyes, divesting themselves quickly of all humanity. “Fathe—papa,” she pleaded. “It’s me.  _ Please _ ! It’s me! Elizabeth! I—“

She did not have to finish, because Veronica had recovered from the blow, snatched up a kitchen knife from the upended table, and plunged it into Hal’s flank. Another roar, and he released Betty, who reeled and clutched her bruised throat. He bore down on Veronica now, who backed away, holding him at knife point. Effortlessly, he slapped the weapon from her hand. Then he pounced, driving her into the floor with the sheer mass of his body. Veronica cried out in pain. He dug into her shoulders with half-sprouted claws. And he began mumbling and hissing with his thick, clumsy tongue. 

The very worst part, Betty decided, as she lay back, recovering from the near strangulation, was that she could almost  _ understand  _ him. It was not mere animal grunting. It was a language. And if she could so far comprehend only the anger and the desperation clinging to each slurred, dripping word, soon she would understand the words. She felt her own lips, thickening, becoming rubbery and smooth. Her skin, slowly creeping through the shades toward green. Eyes stretching, widening. 

No.  _ No _ .

She sprang to her feet. She snatched up the fallen knife, still slick with her father’s blood. Hal forced his claws deeper into Veronica’s flesh. And then Betty plunged the blade deep into his throat. The blood exploded from severed veins and arteries like a burst boiler. It was still red. But it was dark,  _ deep  _ red, almost black. It would be black, soon. Or would have been, had she not halted the transformation.

Hal fell back, clutching his throat. The blood flowed over his thick fingers. He tried to speak or cry, but the blood tumbled back down his throat and choked every word. And then it choked him. And soon he was dead.

Betty helped Veronica to her uneasy feet. They embraced each other, both weeping in open dismay. 

In the center of the room, Polly lay curled against herself, sniffling. 

“I think I’m okay,” Veronica whimpered, touching her lacerated shoulders.

The girls rushed to Polly, and to Alice. Polly was incoherent, babbling perhaps nonsense, or perhaps a language unused to human tongues.

Alice, Betty found, to her tempered relief, was still breathing. 

“Mama?” she begged, shaking her wounded mother by the shoulders. “Mama?” she bleated, trembling and terrified, with the desperation of a small child who just wanted her parents to fix everything. “Mama, please!”

Alice Cooper’s stomach was nearly laid open, by what Betty imagined were her father’s claws. If she peered with enough intent, she could see the wet, slippery ropes that were her mother’s intestines beyond the split flesh and shattered bone. So she did not peer.

“Oh God, Elizabeth,” Alice sighed. Her face was colorless. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Mama,” Betty sobbed. “What happened to father? What’s happening to  _ me _ ?  _ Please _ !”

“I’m so sorry,” she repeated.

“Please,” Betty swallowed her own salty tears. “Please talk to me!” When Alice said nothing, she pushed onwards. “Who was my grandfather? What was father’s father’s name? Tell me!”

“William,” Alice weakly responded. “William Blossom.”

“No,” Betty moaned, as if she could negate the truth with sheer force of will. “No!”

“He was the son of Marius Blossom,” Alice said. "Oh, God. When he had your father, he’d already begun to change. He just hoped to God it wouldn’t pass on to his son. But it did. When William knew he would no longer be able to live above the water, he went into the sea. It was better. Better, before he hurt anyone, like—they said he drowned. That’s what they said. Oh God, your father and I, we hoped so much it would not pass to you. We should have never made that gamble. My love, I’m so sorry,” Alice reached out to touch her daughter’s face. Betty just shook her head. “When we knew for certain your father had inherited this… _ evil _ . We searched. Every time your father was away, he was away for  _ your  _ sakes, you and Polly. Searching for something. Some cure. We thought we had more time,” Alice looked into Betty’s great eyes that would be become the unmoving plates of the Deep Ones. “We didn’t know you would go so soon, Elizabeth.”

“But why did he  _ do  _ this?” Betty demanded. “Why did he hurt you? Attack Polly?”

“He was too far gone. We thought we had more time,” Alice repeated. “The man in him was going quick.”

“And me?” Betty demanded. She could not feel anything but horror. She could hardly experience pity or fear for the mother dying before her. The horror burrowed into her every nerve and every tendon and the thickness of every bone. Horror.  _ Horror _ . The  _ Horror _ . No.  _ No _ . “How long do I have before I—I—“

“I’m so sorry, Betty,” Alice said once more. “We hoped to God it was not really a matter of the blood. We really did. I’m so sorry. We failed you.” 

Alice’s head fell back. Her breaths dropped in frequency. Betty shook her hard.

“No! No! Mama! Mama! Please! Please! I’m having a nightmare and I can’t wake up!” 

And Alice breathed no more.

Veronica embraced her friend. But Betty tore away. She buried her face in her dead mother’s shoulder and screamed. 

Veronica pulled her back again and held her tight, even while her friend thrashed and fought in her agonizing panic.

“Betty! Betty! Please,” Veronica begged, gripping Betty’s shoulders and crushing her into the firmest embrace she could muster.

They sat like that for awhile, Veronica sobbing lightly while Betty alternately screamed and wept in her arms, saddled with the horrible reality of her blood and her family. Polly sat in the corner, gibbering alternately in English and that strange other tongue.

An hour passed, or perhaps some hours. It was difficult to know, for the clouds had grown even thicker, and a new wind from the sea started up, bringing with it fresh loads of freezing rain.

Then someone hurled their way through the still-open front door of the Register. She held a pistol. And she was heaving, her chest puffing in and out. And her waist and legs were painted in blood.

It was Penelope Blossom. Her regularly prim and ordered hair had sprung into wild tangles slick with sweat and rain. 

Veronica knelt on the floor, midst the carnage, holding Betty to her breast, who had ceased to wail and fallen into a defeated simpering.

Penelope aimed her pistol at the girls.

“Where is he?” she demanded, high and regal. “Where is that stupid boy? Where is the  _ book _ ?” 

It took Betty some time to break from her woe and paralyzing terror. But Penelope’s presence did it. 

“You’re too late,” Betty hissed, allowing herself to enjoy a little morsel of victory amidst all this catastrophe. The rain beat against the walls. Whatever happened to her, at least the world might be preserved. “He and Cheryl are going to destroy it.”

Penelope howled with laughter. And when she was done laughing, she slid the gun into her belt, and crashed down in a sagging chair, only a foot or two from Hal’s body. 

“Oh, then we’re all goddamned,” she smiled thinly. “I suppose you poor things really went in for my daughter’s tragic little tale, didn’t you?” 

Betty steeled herself, determined not to be taken in by some trick.

“What are you—“

“Poor, pretty Elizabeth,” Penelope sighed. “I see you’re already starting to change! You’ll be fit for the briny deep soon enough!”

“Shut up!” Veronica commanded, before Betty could defend herself. 

“What did Cheryl tell you two? That Clifford and I were evil sorcerers scheming to enslave the human race?” She laughed again.

Betty hissed. Her shifting lips smacked together, unwieldy and stiff.

“Yes. What are you talk—“

“Oh, you silly girls. The stupid boy, Jones, at least I can understand. When that girl of mine looks at you with those big, pretty eyes, well—what young man could resist? But what excuse do you two have, eh?”

“What are you talking about?” Betty repeated, still restrained in Veronica’s arms. 

Penelope laughed. She lazily aimed her weapon at the two.

“It’s true enough. Whatever Cheryl told you. In part, at least.” 

And then she told them a story.

* * *

When Cheryl and Jason Blossom were born, it was some long months before they were presentable to society. For in the first weeks after birth, they hardly looked like human infants, much less Blossoms. 

Penelope would never forget gazing with awesome horror on the bodies of her squirming newborn twins, before they acclimated to the order of this world. The alien geometries of their spiraling tendrils and grasping claws and myriad eyes. The senseless fangs in a dozen formless mouths that drooled and gnashed. Proportions and angles that made no sense on earth and frustrated human conception.

But with the days, the outward stamp of their Father receded in favor of forms that exemplified instead unparalleled human beauty.

They became  _ human _ .

Yet Penelope feared their humanity was only a shallow artifice. Sometimes she watched her sweet-faced twins asleep in their bed and wondered; if she were to cut them each open with a scalpel, what oozing, pulsing horrors, what black striated flesh and unearthly creeping tissues she would find within. 

But she would never do that. Any more than the Virgin Mary could have slain the infant Christ. 

She was toasted and feted by all her relations, here and abroad. Blossoms and their acolytes in the faith came from as far as England and India and the Argentine to hail the newborn godlings, like the magi at Bethlehem. Penelope was called the Bride of Yog-Sothoth. The great hope of the Old Ones. 

Easy to say when they had not suffered the ‘affections’ of the great god themselves (it was not easy going, to be ravished by a divinity). Nor had they carried his vital spawn for all those months. 

And of course, no one ever asked Penelope if she would  _ like  _ to bear the children of Yog-Sothoth. But that was the nature of devotion. It meant sacrifice. 

For centuries, millennia, even, they had struggled to free Great Cthulhu, that he might in turn bid Yog-Sothoth open the gate and thus raise the Old Ones from their deathlike slumber to renewed kingship of the earth.

All looked with gleaming purpose to that glorious day when the Old Ones came again, and the faithful would rule beside them and over the teeming masses of mankind, forever and ever. 

And perhaps these twins, these blessings of the gods, with divine blood coursing ruddy ‘neath their fair flesh, might be the ones to throw wide the gate at last. 

That was Clifford’s hope, certainly. 

Penelope sometimes demanded of him  _ what  _ it was in the dream of commanding the earth that stirred such excitement? What new comfort would it bring? Would it cause the sun to shine brighter? Didn’t they have enough with their fine old house and heaps of gold?

And Clifford would only say: “you must keep on, climbing upwards. Until you can’t rise any higher. The foot of the gods is the highest you can ascend. So we will.”

Cheryl and Jason grew up, under the eager eye of their parents, and of a hundred priests and laity besides. They learned to mimic the outward forms of humanity well. That was half their heritage, after all. 

The twins were inseparable, bound to one another through some dauntless cord of essence that transcended the earthly and the mundane. They moved, felt, and for a time even talked as one. Lovely and fair-featured as they were, with their great eyes and ruddy hair, they were a sullen couple. They regarded everything and everyone with a kind of alien distaste, like a bold adventurer deals with a primal tribe. 

But Penelope loved them nevertheless. They were her children. How could she not? Even if Clifford and their fellow faithful regarded the twins only as guiding lights to the promised kingdom of the Great Old Ones. They were  _ hers _ . Her babies. 

She knew what they were. She knew that as much as they were hers, if they were hers at all, they were also  _ His _ . But they were hers, too. And, she realized with some pitiful satisfaction, they were  _ not  _ Clifford’s, even if he laid some claim to them. 

Penelope looked into their cherubic faces, ignored what might lurk beneath the gentle skin, and loved them. 

She tried to rear and coddle them the way she might have any full-blooded human child. She held them and hushed them when they wept, even though they rarely did. She nursed them from her own breast, even if it seemed they had no need for mother’s milk. As they grew, she taught them with much care as any well-born lad or lass ought to be taught. She read them stories to calm and delight them. 

But they did not  _ want  _ to be reared as half-blooded human children. 

When she read them tales of dragons and knights, they returned unenchanted and uninspired. The woe and weal, the conquests and the withering of man seemed to hold no interest for them. Their eyes sat dead in their pretty skulls when confronted with history or poetry. They understood, fine, but they were not  _ stirred _ . The affairs of the vulgar world could not hold them for a moment. Why  _ should  _ they? They were hardly of this world at all. 

But it broke Penelope’s heart. That she had given so little to her children, in blood or spirit. That their humanity might really be so transient. They aped mortal affect fine. Perhaps no one outside the family could suppose they were anything more than a little odd. But to Penelope, the shallowness of their human presentation was horrendously clear. 

Clifford told her it didn’t matter what she felt. So did the priests of the Old Ones. Her task was to guide and guard the young ones, ‘til such a time came that they would prevail to open the gate of Yog-Sothoth. 

Sometimes what humanity they’d imbibed in their mother’s womb did break through. Like when Jason begged for a beautiful waistcoat he’d seen in a shop window in Boston, or when Cheryl broke down in tears because the children at school were cruel to her. But even when Penelope wished to cultivate the mortality that existed somewhere in their alien bosoms, Clifford ground it out of them. They were not simply another pair of children. They were the promise of the gods and of Yog-Sothoth himself, and they ought to conduct themselves as such. 

Their ‘religious instruction’—their initiation into the cruel and ancient cult of the Old Ones—was also left to Clifford, thank God. Penelope had little stomach for it.

But even this reverend inculcation they took in stride. The priests of the Old Ones came from as far afield as China to minister to the children of Yog-Sothoth and prepare them for the great destiny that was their birthright. They pontificated to the divine twins on the primordial rites of the Old Ones, and immediately Cheryl and Jason busied themselves correcting or refuting every bit of liturgical minutiae the Holy Men set forth. Penelope could see clear the disturbance and chagrin on the faces of the priests, as millennia-old doctrine was exploded by a pair of children. But what could these learned sages say? For all this time they had glimpsed the objects of their worship as through a glass darkly. Now their promised ones had come. The heirs of the Great God Yog himself were here on earth to instruct  _ them _ . How could they wag their tongues at the son and daughter of the Most High? And when the twins spoke there was a wisdom of ageless spaces and dimensions on their lips. So the priests nodded grimly, and revised their stony laws in the face of this new revelation. 

With the months and years, she began to truly fear her children. 

Even when they grew up strong and beautiful, and became the objects of so much local affection. Or especially then. 

When the twins were fifteen Penelope caught them in bed together for the first time. She was mortified, as any mother might be. This could not stand. They were brother and sister. The same blood in her veins as in his. 

She demanded them out of each other’s arms. They were unshaken. They regarded her with that same black, contemptuous indifference that boiled ceaselessly in their eyes And when she moved to pry them apart by force, Cheryl caught her wrist in a grip much too powerful for a girl her size and age, and said: “remember thyself,  _ mother _ .” 

And that was when Penelope realized they really were  _ not  _ hers in any way that mattered.

Clifford did not come to her defense. Rather the opposite. He hissed that her place was not questioning the ways of the gods, and that she ought to make herself useful, instead. 

So when the twins were sixteen, the great day came at last. The culmination of their brief existence on the earth. After millennia of unrequited devotion, they were called open to open the gate. They fasted and they prayed for weeks, calling out to their distant Father in tongues that scratched at the gates of sanity. 

And they failed.

The specifications were met to the slightest particularity. But they failed. The priests wailed and rent their robes. Clifford was inconsolable. Penelope was ever so slightly relieved.

The twins marinated in their failure, unexplained until old Rose, whose love for the Old Ones was never quite manifest, spoke: “too much of  _ you _ in them, darling,” she hissed at Penelope.

Penelope nearly cackled at the prospect of her children being  _ too  _ human.

But that must have been it. What else could it be?

“We  _ failed  _ mumsy,” Cheryl sighed, tears in her big eyes. Jason only stared, lips tight and face wiped clean of emotion. And Penelope comforted her children, what else could she do? 

In his desperation to rip open the door and win for himself the godhood he was sure he deserved, Clifford chartered the  _ Selkie _ ’s ill-fated expedition to R’lyeh. If Cthulhu would not awake of his own accord, then he would be forced up from his tomb, and he would be  _ compelled _ to summon Yog-Sothoth. 

It failed as well. The stars were not quite right. Cthulhu awakened at less than full potency, and the attentions of a steamship and its sabotaged boilers returned him to his timeless slumber.

About this time the twins began to have their dreams. 

Cheryl awoke one morning in rapture and crying “I have spoken to Father!” and of course, she did not mean Clifford.

Cheryl and Jason, who had always been so listless and indifferent, were animated by a black, alien power from the deep wastes beyond this sphere. At last, they felt true purpose. It was suddenly their great passion to open the gate of their Father.

Then the deep and awful truth came to the fore at last. 

Penelope stumbled upon it by pure happenstance. Fortune brought her by the ground floor drawing room while her twins relaxed therein. Jason lay in repose on the ottoman, his sister settled atop him, his arms around her waist. They took no notice of their mother. 

“What do you think the earth will look like?” Cheryl asked, dreamily. “When it’s all cleared off?”

“Beautiful,” Jason said, in that laconic way of his.

“Imagine how lovely it will be,” Cheryl sighed. “When there are no more man-things. No more shrieking birds. No more creeping serpents or cattle. No more of the fleshy vermin. No more disgusting vines or flowers. No earth things at all. Just…purity.  _ New  _ life. Cleanliness.” She squeezed his hand. “And you and me. Together. Until the Flutes stop.” 

“Together,” he repeated. He kissed her knuckles. 

“Oh, you and I, with a whole world to remake in our image,” she sounded absolutely enchanted by the prospect. A giddy child. “In Father’s image! Not one man or woman to despoil the vista. And imagine how  _ beautiful  _ we’ll be,” Cheryl laughed. She stared at her own pale, gentle hand while she spoke. “When we’re not constrained by these forms anymore.” 

“You are already beautiful,” Jason assured her, and planted another doting kiss on her palm. “Not like the loveless, deviant fleshly things that creep over this sphere. You are  _ sensational _ .” 

“But how much more so?” 

So Penelope understood at last. The Old Ones never had any intention of sharing the earth with their human devotees. They never had any intention of reducing mankind to a slave race. No. Mankind would be obliterated. Scoured from the planet’s surface along with every other exposition of life, like vermin from an infested homestead. A clean slate. This was the reward of the fervent priests and laymen who worshipped the Old Ones and the Outer Gods with such violent faith. Not a place in the everlasting priesthood. But the same annihilation that awaited all their fellows.

For a moment, Penelope wondered at the treachery of the gods. That they should promise paradise and deliver extermination. But then— _ was  _ it treachery? Had Yog-Sothoth, ever  _ promised  _ kingship and eternal life to his human supplicants? Had even Cthulhu, or Dagon? Had they ever asked for worship  _ at all _ ? Perhaps man simply stumbled onto the divine, and found himself incapable of admitting and accepting that the divine did not  _ care  _ about him. That he was  _ nothing  _ to the gods. That beings of such potency required as much from man as man did from a toad. 

No. Man could not accept that. He had to believe the gods  _ loved  _ him. The he was important to them. That he would  _ reign  _ with them. 

And the gods allowed it. Why not? Would a man deny the adoration of a worm? It is meaningless. Harmless. Let the worm think itself more than a cipher. But when it is time to till the soil, the worm will be disposed of nevertheless. There is no malice in that. It is simply what is done, and no one will weep for the worm save the rest of the worms. 

Penelope almost wanted to laugh. It was catharsis. A moment’s victory over her husband, and all the other hot-blooded cultists who lived for the hour they would reign with the Great Old Ones. They had driven her to bear the children of Yog-Sothoth, with an eye ever to the great day the portal should open, and without a moment’s thought for  _ her _ . And now, their dreams of power and glory would be turned back on them, and they would receive oblivion for their eternal reward.

How  _ poetic _ !

But then of course she recalled that some two billion others would go away into everlasting destruction alongside them. 

So she told Clifford. But he would not believe her. It was like asking a Christian to forgo belief in the Second Advent of Christ. 

And yet when they confronted Cheryl and Jason, Yog-Sothoth’s surly children did not even endeavor to conceal their Father’s assignment.

“Yes—when Father comes and opens the gate for the Old Ones, the earth must be cleansed off,” Cheryl said, almost sweetly, examining her fingernails. “Don’t be silly mother. You don’t move into a new house without a  _ renovation  _ here and there. What are we, vagabonds? Good  _ Lord _ .” 

Clifford was livid, naturally. 

“Centuries of service to the Great God Yog. Devotion to the Old Ones without  _ equal _ . My father, and my father’s father—and this is our family’s reward?”

This was rejoined by Cheryl’s: “who are you to question our Father? If you  _ truly  _ value the will of the gods, you ought to be  _ glad  _ to play such a vital part.” 

It was a truly surreal scene, as Clifford and Penelope begged desistance from the extermination of all humanity. When pressed as to  _ why  _ Yog and the Old Ones wished the earth so cleansed, Cheryl would only ever say “do you explain your reasoning each time you crush a spider?” 

And then Clifford remembered. A saving hope.

“You  _ can’t  _ open the gate!” he spat, almost mocking. “You’ve tried once, and you’ve failed.”

“True,” Cheryl sighed, still examining her hands. Jason stood at her shoulder, looming wordlessly. “We’ve too much of this foul red man-blood in our veins, alas!” Her hot, dark, ageless eyes flashed. “But the next one won’t.” 

“The  _ next  _ one?” Clifford had been betrayed. By his gods. He was reared to believe in eternal life. In  _ salvation _ . For him, if not the greater part of man. And he was to receive damnation instead. The rage rode every word out of his mouth. “What  _ next  _ one?”

It seemed, the twins’ inability to open the gate sprung from inordinate human heritage. 

So Cheryl devised her cunning plan. Heredity was not an exact science. Sometimes a child was born that took more after its distant ancestors than after its mother or father themselves.

It was Cheryl’s thought that, should she and Jason conceive a child, such a one might very well have more of the divine in him than either of his parents, since the godlike element was inevitably more powerful than the human. And such a one might prevail to open the gate where the twins had failed. 

At the presentation of this devilish design, Clifford decided at once to spurn the gods who had betrayed him, and kill the children that were not his before they could do as they intended. 

And begrudgingly, keeping ever before her the heavy stakes, Penelope acquiesced. 

* * *

“Of course, they would need some poor lad to present as  _ father  _ for their bastard child of incest. Once such a one was conceived. And that was where your friend Mr. Jones has come in. I understand he’s played his part nicely.” 

The two girls listened, rapt and horrified. 

Veronica wished dearly she could disbelieve every word slipping from Penelope Blossom’s mouth. That Cheryl and Jason were not even human? That they were the bastard spawn of some extra-dimensional god, bent on blasting the earth free of all life and dragging it back into the timeless void for some inscrutable purpose? 

But there was a dead fishman lying hardly five feet away from her. Polly Cooper lay unconscious beside the corpse. Alice Cooper still sat propped up against the wall, ripped open just above the waist.

And worst of all, Veronica still held her best friend in her arms, as poor, luckless Betty Cooper slowly transformed into a sea monster herself. 

What grounds did she have to  _ disbelieve  _ Penelope?

“Wh—why?” Veronica asked, still beyond comprehension. Betty shivered in her arms.

“Why  _ what _ ?” Penelope chuckled, swinging her pistol lazily in her hand.

“Why would you let this—this  _ Old One impregnate _ you?”

“Yog-Sothoth is not an  _ Old One _ ,” came Penelope’s firm and learned response. “He is as far beyond them as they are beyond us. He is of the Outer Gods. Those great powers that dwell in the yawning gulfs between worlds. Imagine all our universe, with its whirling suns and pendant planets, is the campfire of some primitives huddled round in a wood, mistaking light for safety. Yog-Sothoth is the tiger in the forest, just beyond the farthest flicker of the firelight.”

But the metaphor that stuck in Veronica’s mind was that of the spider. Penelope had said that one never gives a spider a reason for its demise. What kind of pathetic madman tries to reason with a spider? The vermin is not worth such attention. 

She conceived of a great, cosmic boot coming down on this world. Grinding it into the ash heap of ages. Just a spider. 

Penelope stared vaguely into the pock-marked living room wall. 

Betty laid her head into Veronica’s shoulder. Her skin seemed to turn a fiercer green with every passing minute. She felt the skin on her friend’s arms rise and shift like a liquid sand, the soft, tactile flesh sliding into a reptilian consistency. 

“How do I help her?” Veronica demanded.

“What?” Penelope asked. 

“How do I  _ help  _ her?” Veronica demanded. 

“Elizabeth? Oh, you can’t. Soon she won’t even have that pretty blonde hair, anymore.” 

“Bullshit! You know about this stuff! Tell me what to do!”

A few tears slipped from Betty’s widening eyes.

“Nothing to be done. It is a matter of the blood. Even if you could restore her humanity, it would be a rather pyrrhic victory. If your idiot friend Jones has the book, then I’m sure he’s already delivered it to my Cheryl. So the gate will be open soon enough, and then none of it will much matter.” 

“You said Jason was dead,” Betty managed to sound out, pressing her rubbery lips together. “So—“

“Oh! He was!” Penelope laughed. “Quite dead indeed.”

“Clifford killed him,” Betty croaked.

“Right enough. With my…grudging blessing. He was determined to do so as soon as our twins— _ my  _ twins—made it clear they fully intended to invite their Father into our world for supper, regardless of whether it might entail the extinguishing of all organic life. Though I suspect my husband was motivated as much by spite for the gods as for the welfare of mankind. When Jason went off to Europe we thought: ’well enough, perhaps he’ll catch an errant shell.’ Of course, he didn’t. And then he came home, and took up with  _ your  _ sister, darling,” Penelope jabbed a finger at Betty, and then at Polly, lying prone across the room. “And he proved—as he sought to do—that unlike so many hybrids he  _ could  _ sire viable offspring. So Clifford decide the time for tarrying was over. And he shot the lad right between the eyes.” Penelope touched her forehead in the indicated spot. She smiled.

“And Cheryl?” Veronica asked, still unconvinced by the woman’s story. “And the boat capsizing—“

“A little story we came up with. And coerced Cheryl to go along with, lest she share her beloved brother’s fate. Of course she did. And a few days after they finished searching the surf for his corpse, Clifford went and dumped it in, lashed to a brick or two. Where the law had already looked. Brilliant. Except, then he came back.”

“Jason’s not alive,” Veronica insisted. Though she was rapidly losing any warrant to deride supernatural phenomena of any kind.

“I saw him,” Betty shivered. “At Thornhill. In the window. I saw him.”

“Betty—“ Veronica tried to say.

“I’m certain you  _ did  _ see him!” Penelope exclaimed. “Cheryl raised him, after all. Clifford wanted to kill her, too. But that would have been too suspect, don’t you think? And anyways, I told him the threat only existed so long as they both lived. Silly me.” Penelope knocked on her skull with the barrel of her revolver. “The girl was inconsolable of course. Spent the nights crying out to Yog-Sothoth. ‘Father! Father! My God! Why have you forsaken me?’ Well, I suppose he hadn’t. Because then Jason’s body washed up on the shore. And Cheryl and her  _ Father  _ did the rest. I’ve never seen a girl so in love, as when that boy got up and walked again.” She raised a hand. “But there was  _ one  _ recourse left. They could do nothing without the Necronomicon. So we destroyed the copy in our home, before Cheryl could parse out its formulae. Then there was the copy in Miskatonic University,” Penelope said. “We sent Mr. Jones—the elder that is—to retrieve it for us. He had little love for our family, of course, after the little mission to the South Pacific Clifford sent him on. But he knew what was at stake. And he might have taken the book! If the  _ other  _ Mr. Jones hadn’t gotten in the way. I suppose you’ll have Jughead to thank when the heavens split open and the Old Ones erase this pitiful band of apes from the cosmos forever.” There was a long, dreadful silence.

“Well—what do you intend to do, now? What do  _ we  _ do?” Veronica demanded.

“Oh, nothing,” Penelope said. “The truth is, even if we’d reached the Necronomicon first, we all live by the grace of the Old Ones. Sooner or later, the stars will align. This world was theirs before. It will be again. Sooner or later. Man has no say in that, and neither do you.” She drew back the hammer on her revolver. “As for me, I don’t intend to wait on the End of Days.” 

“Wait—“ Veronica reached out a hand.

Penelope pressed the barrel of the gun to her temple and fired. The little pistol cracked like a cannon. Veronica screamed. Betty flinched. Polly did not awaken. 

Penelope tumbled from her chair to the ground, the right side of her face painted thoroughly with stark red blood and clumps of dissipated gore. Her eyes hung wide open, glazed and denuded of presence. 

“God…” Veronica moaned. 

They huddled there together, the two girls in each other’s arms, Betty’s breaths rattling as the developing gill slits carved into the flesh of her throat fluttered in grotesque synchronicity. Veronica pressed her face into her friend’s shoulder and wept.

She refused to believe all was hopeless. Refused to lay down and die. A spider could fight the boot, couldn’t it? Not well, but it could be done. A spider could bite its executioner’s ankle. It could flee and hide. 

It was not hopeless.  _ Could  _ not be.

About ten minutes after Penelope’s easy suicide, the door to the  _ Register  _ blew open again. A figure stumbled inside, chased by blasting gales and sheets of northern autumn rain. He wore a coat soaked through to the last thread, and clutched in his arms some great, heavy tome bound with a hideously fitted leather. 

Jughead appraised the carnage. He dropped the book.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed. For the moment inattentive to the corpses of Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, or the bleeding remains of Penelope Blossom still clinging to her pistol, he fell to his knees next to the girls, and brought Betty up by her shoulders. “Betty? Hey?” He patted her cheek. “Hey, Betts. You okay?” She regarded him with a cold comfort, like she was very glad to see his face, but just as certain there was nothing he could do to ameliorate the tragedy now unfolding. “Betty?” he begged once more, desperate for an answer. “What’s  _ happened  _ to her?” Jughead demanded of Veronica, as he gazed on his friend’s discolored skin, the parallel slashes in her throat, her bulging eyes. 

“She’s—“ Veronica began to say.

“I’m one of them, Jug,” Betty answered for herself. A few tears percolated on the surface of her great, glassy, and evermore piscine eyes. But they could not fall, for her biology no longer permitted it. “I’m one of them.” 

“One of—“ he shook his head and threw rainwater from his hair, unwilling to understand more than unable. “One of  _ who _ ?”

“Them,” Betty sobbed. “The Deep Ones. The sea race. My grandfather—he was William Blossom.” 

“No,” Jughead said as the dark revelation flitted behind his eyes. “That’s—“

“It’s true, Jughead,” Veronica whimpered. “It’s—“

Jughead’s cringed away. And then he saw Penelope’s corpse. 

“What is she—“

“She was looking for you, Jug,” Betty sniffed. “She said Cheryl and Jason—“

“Jason’s alive,” Jughead affirmed. “I don’t know how, but he is. He and—“

“She said the strangest things,” Veronica said. “That they were the children of—“

“I know !” But then a fast, weak and fractured optimism bloomed in his eyes. “But I have it!” He snatched the Necronomicon off of the floor. “I have the book! Look, as long as they don’t have the book, they can do nothing. As I understand it. We just—“

“Destroy it!” Veronica half-roared. “Destroy it  _ now _ !” 

“I don’t know that it’ll take,” Jughead said. “I don’t know what to—“

Betty rose to her knees, a new life in her deforming breast. She forced the wide, ogling eyes closed and then open again. She took Jughead’s hands in hers. Her heart fell out of its regulated cadence. She caught his eyes, frightened and wet and miserable, and she wanted to embrace him and hold him and tell him all would be well. Instead she just leaned in and briefly kissed him. He froze for a moment, as her changing, thinning lips touched his. But then the sorrowful fact of her physical transformation was forgotten and he remembered  _ who  _ she was and he pressed into the kiss.

“Listen. We have to try,” she said. “Come on. Together. We can burn it. Or—or tear it to pieces. We—“

A window in one of the rear rooms shattered with a cacophonous explosion of glass. All able leapt to their feet. Polly stirred in her half-sleep. Betty pried the revolver from Penelope’s cooling hands and jammed it into the waist of her dress, just barely secreted beneath her skirts. 

Another sound emanated from the rear of the house. This one not a hard, fine shattering, but a broad, slopping wetness. And then they came, filing into the room, shambling colossi ripped from their element and ill at ease above the waves. The Deep Ones moved on flat, webbed feet and rent the wood floors with black claws. They stood some eight feet, nearly scraping the ceiling, their loathsome, rubbery heads caked with sea salt and slick with rainwater. The gills in their throats fluttered and strained desperately against the cool, wet air. Their cavernous serpent jaws fell open, lined with those assembled ranks of vile shark’s teeth. 

Jughead vomited.

And Betty looked into the flat, black eyes of the Deep Ones, and saw the revolting discharge rolling over their mottled hides, and she saw her own blood in them, and she screamed. She went for the revolver. 

Veronica scrambled away.

And it was all in vain, because then the fishmen were on them, grasping with sopping cold frog’s hands, moaning in their gurgling alien tongue, their claws ripping at skirts and greatcoats. One of them tore the Necronomicon from Jughead’s hands.

Outside, the storm intensified. The rain fell with ever greater deliberation, and the winds shook Riverdale’s little fishermen’s houses on their rotting foundations. 

And the Deep Ones seized their prey. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this technically makes Jason and Cheryl Cthulhu's aunt and uncle, as well as the infinitely more attractive half-siblings of the unfortunate Whateley twins (they're just lucky they didn't come out looking like a ball of spaghetti with a face)
> 
> Christmas dinner at grandpa Yog's place probably gets weird.


	8. the great god Yog-Sothoth

The Deep Ones took from the house all that were still living, along with the Necronomicon, and the half-changed corpse of Harold Cooper. They hauled their victims through the surf at the beach, moving languidly and lazily in some four feet of water. The black sky churned and broke open in fresh torrents of rain. The frozen water bit through Jughead’s sodden trousers and chewed the tender skin of his thighs. They were borne along the length of the shore, northwards, like a caravan of old slaves. Betty staggered alongside him. He tried to reach out and hold her hand, but soon his fingers grew lifeless and cold with the stinging waves, and fell from hers. Veronica slogged wearily behind them. Polly failed to awaken from her terror-induced unconsciousness, and so one of the Deep Ones carried her across his broad, mucilaginous forearms like a newly minted bride. Another two ported along Hal’s remains, as in a funeral procession, heavy with inhuman solemnity. 

But by the time the fishmen dragged them to the little strip of beach at the foot of the Thornhill Manor, the shower had ended. The air was still thick, muggy with unshed rain. Jughead collapsed to his knees in the sand, all the feeling gone from his feet and his legs. Betty shuffled along behind him, and then fell at his side.

Two figures awaited them, a few meters up the beach. The moonlight played on their copper hair. The Blossom twins watched with peaceful satisfaction. Cheryl’s black pre-war mourning dress clung tight to her shoulders and hips, viscid with rainwater. From the distance and in the very feeble moonlight, Jughead could still make out the curve of her pregnant stomach. Her lips parted into a conqueror’s smile. Jason stood at her side and slightly behind her, head ever so slightly bowed, arms crossed, US Army greatcoat swollen wet. 

Betty mumbled something Jughead could not quite hear.

Veronica eked out the Lord’s prayer in Spanish. 

“ _ Padre nuestra, que estás en el cielo, santificado sea tu nombre. Venga tu reino…”  _

_ Thy Kingdom come _ .

One of the Deep Ones shambled up the sloping beach. The wet flopping of its webbed feet against hard-packed sand sounded with a disgusting amorphous cadence. It clutched the Necronomicon tight in one of its twitching claws. Cheryl boldly advanced. The creature held the book forward, and even inclined its head in deference. From the distance, Jughead marked the sheer revulsion writ in his erstwhile fiancée’s eyes and on her lips even as she took the heavy old tome from the monster’s hand. He wondered if these  _ things  _ expected to thrive once the Old Ones returned to earth. Why should they look forward to anything but the same oblivion as mankind?

The creatures marched their prisoners forward up the beach. 

“Oh!” Cheryl half-gasped in a sort of orgiastic excitement. “It’s  _ beautiful _ !” She ran one of her soft hands over the book’s mottled leather binding, tracing the fine and blasphemous patterns carved therein. Jason drew nearer to his sister, and with a contented sigh she leaned her head into his shoulder. He presumed to touch the old volume as she had, trailing a finger along the rotting spine. “It’s like I can  _ feel  _ Father here,” Cheryl exulted. “Right here, in all the fullness of his strength.” Jason only allowed himself a cautious smile and a nod. 

Still in the arms of her hellish captor, Polly Cooper stirred. Her pretty blue eyes slid open, and she was gazing forthrightly into the voluminous, blank stare and dripping shark’s jaws of the Deep One. Jughead expected that she would burst her lungs in a scream.

“Polly,” Betty said from down in the sand. “It’s ok—“

She did not scream. She only gasped, and then moaned in terror. She wriggled desperately in the thing’s monstrously firm embrace. It paid her no mind. Polly threw up a hand to claw at its filmy eyes. But it easily pushed her wrist down with a slap of the hooked paw. 

“Wait!” Polly cried. “Wait!” 

Cheryl shot off something that had the sound and brief inflection of an order. But it was not in English, or any language Jughead imagined human beings spoke. The sound came from the base of her chest, produced courtesy of strange, pulsing organs that nothing born of this common sphere ought to have. 

It was surely something like ‘bring her’, for the fishman lurched forward, carrying along a wailing, begging Polly Cooper with it. 

“Put her down!” Betty cried. “Put her down! Cheryl, for God’s sakes let us go!” But Betty’s own voice began to fail her. Strange and mucid noises interrupted her words, for her own throat and lungs were no longer made for human speech. Jughead felt his stomach turn and the rims of his eyes brim with simmering tears. 

A Deep One crouched down beside Betty, and gripped one of her shoulders.

“Get away from her!” Veronica screeched, only for another of the sea beasts to silence her with a rough blow to the back of the head. 

The Deep One asked something of Betty in its abyssal tongue. She stared into its eyes with impossible terror for a brief instant. And then she responded. Not in English. But in the language of the mermen. 

It did not seem she realized she had spoken so, until the green-white tinge of her face lightened further and her darkening blood rushed to her throat. Veronica muttered some half-plea of silent gods. Betty moaned in horror. The language of the things. She had never learned it, of course. It was writ into every length of vein and every pulsing membrane of her inherited flesh. It was always with her. Inescapable.

Jughead tried to reach out for her hand, glad he could hardly see through his obscurant tears. 

A Deep One pulled him back.

“Betty…” Veronica tried to sob. “Betty…it’s okay.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. Oh, God. God, help me. God,  _ help me _ !”

Meanwhile, the creature that held Polly Cooper dumped her at the feet of the Blossom twins. 

Cheryl caught a fistful of cornfield blonde hair and yanked her face upwards. Jason watched, dispassionate and cool. 

“Jason,” Polly begged. “Jason—you said you loved me.” 

Jason eyes flicked over to the sea, over her head, like she was not worth a spare moment.

“I did say that,” he responded. Then he shrugged.

“You poor things,” Cheryl sneered. She knelt down and pressed a hand to Polly’s heavily pregnant stomach. “You poor, wretched sub-things. Your ancestors crawled out of the slime-drenched  _ muck  _ when my Father encompassed galaxies. You don’t know what love is. How could you?”

“Cheryl,” Betty pleaded. “Cheryl for the love of God what are you doing?”

“You don’t know what God is, either,” Cheryl laughed. She reached into her dark skirts and produced a long and gleaming length of steel terminating in such a finely hewn tip that the blade looked as if it vanished into the air rather than ended. “What I’m doing—think of this as the first twist of the key.” She laid her palm gently across her own stomach, with a gentleness belying the cruel weapon in the opposite hand. “So that when our little one comes, it will be all the easier for him to pry the door.” 

Jason stooped low, and with the tip of his finger sketched out some crude rune in the sand. The rain came again, borne on wild ocean gales that made standing upright precarious. For the fishmen and the four present humans, at least. The divine twins seemed to have little problem maintaining their balance against the wind. 

The Deep Ones muttered to one another in their oceanic croaks and groans. 

Peals of thunder rang out across the darkened firmament, chased by blasts of silver lightning. 

The storm poured down out of the sky, and reformed itself with an epicenter directly above them. 

“By the way,” Cheryl began, straining to prevail over the salty breeze. “Where’s my mother?”

“Dead,” Betty hissed in her failing, fractured voice.

“Oh?” Cheryl laughed, amused. “Did you—“

“She did.”

“Mmm.” Cheryl cracked open the Necronomicon. “I do love a question that answers itself.” 

The clouds spiraled overhead like a cyclone, and thunderbolts crashed down in such dreadful proximity Jughead expected any minute they would all be struck dead. 

Cheryl released Polly, and Jason instead took a handful of her hair, exposing her throat. She continued to beg and sputter, drinking her own tears in with the sweeping sheaves of rain. 

Cheryl began to read, the knife in one hand and the book in the other.

“ _ Ghnli trhv’nla ph’nglui grlw Yog-Sothoth lkr’ia! Iä! Iä Yog-Sothoth!” _

The Deep Ones chattered in quiet, supine approval. 

Veronica’s ill-recalled Christian prayers melted away before the perverse incantation. 

Cheryl raised the gleaming knife to the storm, which gathered in greater force with every evil word. Polly squeezed her eyes shut.

“Father!” Cheryl cried in clear English, and the storm answered in lazy thunderbolts. “Into thy hands, we commend her spirit!” 

And then slashed Polly’s throat. 

Betty cried out, her twisting throat producing more an animal bellow than a scream. 

Polly pitched forward. One of her feeble hands tried to staunch the flow of blood with little effect. It soon fell away, twitching, and she stretched out on the sand, gore leaking into the fine granular soil. 

Jughead heard a soft undercurrent beneath the tearing wind, and he realized it was Betty’s sobbing.

And then heaven opened.

Jughead could not truly grasp the sight that unveiled itself before him. The clouds seemed to peel away, like curtains drawn aside. Beyond lay not the cosmic sea spattered with glinting stars, but something far deeper, something far older. He did not know if this was an image imprinted directly upon his brain, or if he witnessed something truly playing out within time and space. But whatever he saw, it was not anything his apeish, flabby brain was adapted to see. It was not  _ right _ . It was like a world that was not a world.  _ Finer  _ than this world somehow. The three dimensions faded away, feeble as is a painting against its natural subject. 

And he saw  _ It _ . 

His mind shut It away. Allowed only the slightest slivers of the Thing to filter through to the root reptilian core of his brain. Otherwise, he knew, his spirit and his self would have fractured then and there and left him less than an animal. 

He could not put a face to  _ It _ . To this  _ Thing  _ that must be the great god Yog-Sothoth. The closest analogy Jughead’s spasming brain could seize upon was a photograph he had once seen in a scientific textbook, a crude image of the dividing cell. Each new sphere birthing another two, and so going on to expand forever. But every one of these bright and vital spheres held and dissolved whole worlds, whole oceans of stars and vast plains of everlasting blankness. Yog-Sothoth grew and rippled and ruled over all to the inclusion of time and space themselves. 

And then he understood to the best of his pathetic, fleshy ability: he was looking into eternity.

What struck him most in the nature of the Thing was Its sheer  _ indifference _ . It was so vast, in senses humankind could not even pretend to discern. Cheryl and Jason seemed to believe their Father to be their personal patron, as Jehovah had been to Christ. But how could It be when It was so  _ vast _ ? How could It care for  _ anything _ ? 

The world--the world where men and women struggled and rested and loved and hated and raised empires and peoples and fostered further generations and fought for permanence was only a random  _ mistake  _ on the  _ margins  _ of Yog-Sothoth. When the gates opened and this Thing devoured the Earth, would it even  _ register  _ that it had done just that? Did a man register the billions of infinitesimal specks of matter he ingested with each year of his life? And how much less was the earth to Yog-Sothoth than the minutest of atom of dirt? 

Oh,  _ shame _ .

The agony in Jughead’s heart was not fear. It was not the overwhelming guilt, that he had brought the book here. That he and his friends were going to die, and that all the world would follow suit, all thanks be to him.

The predominant misery attending his heart was  _ shame _ . 

Shame at being so  _ small _ . So  _ pathetic _ . So  _ worthless _ . He was a half-raised ape, just barely dragged from the primordial mire of stupid amoebae and blind, sucking protozoans. He was still a cringing primitive crashing together stone and stick and marveling at sparks. So what if man devised ever more sophisticated means of binding stone and stick? He had not come a step from the black jungle, and he never would. 

Jughead was overcome with an unspeakable urge to lay down and die. He just wanted to escape the  _ shame _ . The shame that he had ever considered himself, or his family, or his friends, or his species worth anything at all. 

He pressed his forehead to the sand desperate to see anything but Yog-Sothoth. But it was no use. The Thing crept between the atoms that comprised his brain. It slithered beneath fibrous tenders and within the pulsing ventricles of his heart.

Somewhere beneath everything, in the realm of greatest insignificance, he caught a gentle popping, like droplets of rain splattering a window.

And then it was gone. The sky was closed again. Yog-Sothoth was gone. Or at the least, the faltering veil between him and this sphere was drawn tight again. For the moment. Jughead felt the water impact his face. Overhead were only storm clouds. 

His mind still railed and beat against the confines of his brain and then against the boundary of his skull, and he felt as if his spirit contrived to leak from his body. But he was back, and at the least, the merest of his sanity remained.

Shapes and colors and the orders of the natural, dimensional world restored themselves. 

And the first thing Jughead saw was Elizabeth Cooper standing over him, shouting over the storm, her voice slowly seeping out of the general, uniform cacophony in his ears.

“Get up!” she shouted. Raindrops rushed down her brow and her cheeks. “Get up!” 

Something was tucked beneath her arm. The Necronomicon. 

He struggled to his feet and realized what had happened. 

In Betty’s other hand she held Penelope Blossom’s discarded revolver. A few feet away, Jason lay on the sand, clutching his face and cursing mightily. Black, slimy ichor trickled out over his fingers. 

Cheryl huddled beside him, clutching a similarly weeping wound in her side. 

In the midst of the gate’s brief disappearance and the vision of Yog-Sothoth, somehow Betty had found the presence of mind to overcome that sanity-shattering revelation and shoot them. And seize the book. 

Veronica staggered behind her. 

The Deep Ones shrank back, evidently fearing the power of the firearm. One of them lay dead on the strand, the top of its skull shorn away by a bullet. Grey and oozing brain melted into the moist sand. The reek of fish poured into Jughead’s nostrils. 

“Betty…” he whimpered, like an injured child. He tried for a hug. She pushed him away.

“Take it!” she cried. “Take the book! Go! Destroy it!” She shoved the Necronomicon into his chest. He took it in his febrile hands. 

The Deep Ones cautiously marched forward again. Jason struggled to his knees and took a dripping, pale hand from his stricken face. Betty’s shot had torn away a significant strip of flesh and skin around and beneath the left eye, exposing ugly green-black tissue dripping with the same turbulent unearthly ichor. He growled. Cheryl rose alongside him.

“Go!” Betty shouted again. She fired another shot in the direction of the fishmen, cowing them for the worth of another second. Two rounds left in the cylinder. 

Veronica took his hand and pulled him from the dreadful scene. “Come on!” she begged.

“Betty,” Jughead croaked. “Come on. Let’s go. Come with us. Let’s—“

“No,” Betty said, and he thanked God (if there was any god besides Yog-Sothoth) that the vigorous rain subsumed the tears on her cheeks. “No.”

“What do you mean?” he bleated. “We need to go! Now!”

“The book!” howled Cheryl, quick recovering from the gunshot with an ease and rapidity beyond mortal flesh. “Give it to us!” she snarled. Jason whimpered in throbbing pain, even as the torn muscle and ligament repaired itself with that ungodly speed. “Oh, quiet,” Cheryl snapped at her brother. “Hardly the first time you’ve suffered a round to the face.”

“I can’t go with you,” Betty sobbed. The Deep Ones lurched closer. She leveled the pistol and loosed her second to last bullet. It struck another of the beasts full in the face. The dome of its squamous skull burst open and washed its fellows in discolored brain. The things howled in anger and protest. “Fuck you!” Betty cried. Then to Jughead: “I’m not going to become one of those things. I won’t.” 

“You  _ won’t _ !” Jughead insisted, even as Veronica tenaciously urged him in the other direction. “Look, we’ll figure something out. We—“

“No. We won’t.”

She kissed him. And it didn’t matter that he could already feel the soft, nubile skin of her cheeks thicken beneath hard piscine scutes. He hardly recoiled at the crude, rubbery tactility of her lips. Or cared that the color had gone almost entirely from her once so lovely eyes. It was  _ her _ . His friend Elizabeth Cooper. Brave and strong and wonderful and kind. And he loved her so, so much, and he had never truly endeavored to demonstrate it. The kiss was over in a brief instant and she smiled at him best she could.

“I love you both so much,” she said. The Deep Ones waddled nearer. And Betty pressed the revolver tight against her temple and spend the final bullet on herself.

She fell to the ground limp and stiff, as if she had never lived at all. As if Jughead had imagined the strength in her limbs and her smile and her good spirit. He would have preferred confronting Yog-Sothoth once more to this vile sight. Blood leaked around Betty’s head in a crude halo. Red blood, but so dark that it already told the green-black it would have soon become. 

“Come  _ on _ !” Veronica dragged away as the Deep Ones reached them, scrambling forward with their inhuman claws.

They stumbled over the beach, northwards. Thornhill jutted up to their right and the roiling sea to their left. Some fifty yards away the Blossom family’s personal dock reached vainly out into the tossing water, a black strip of shadow against the dim grey sky. A boat rocked in the water, moored in a depth of some thirty feet.

“Can you pilot the boat?” Veronica demanded. 

He was in no condition to respond, as his sanity begged for some meager purchase, and the devilish sight of Betty Cooper killing herself printed itself upon every length of nerve in his overtaxed brain.

“Can you?”

“Yes,” was his meek and incapable response. He had served as a hand on fishing boats now and again. 

Something lighter than the thunder snapped. Jughead whirled around.

Jason Blossom was recovered entirely from the (second) bullet in his skull. And he seemed to have little intention of dying again. He lifted own revolver into the prevailing wind and lined up another shot on his quarry. Cheryl raced behind him, exhorting her brother to aim true. 

Jughead turned, and with Veronica at his side, rushed pell mad along the rocky shoreline towards the docks, the Blossom twins nipping at their heels like mad wolves. 

The Deep Ones took to the water once more, and followed parallel by sea.

They reached the slick dock, and Jughead’s new purpose animated him to clear the next twenty steps to the boat and haul Veronica aboard. He hardly wanted to lift his legs again, or to draw another breath. But Betty had begged him with her final gasping breath to go on. To destroy the book. To  _ stop  _ this. And she had said she loved them. And then she died. He was indebted to mankind for his error. But above all, he was indebted to Elizabeth Cooper. And he would not fail her.

“Check the cabin!” he shouted.

“For wh—“

“Anything! Boat hooks! Knives! Guns!” 

Veronica complied, and Jughead feverishly beat the outboard motor to life. The sea churned under the formidable propeller. He allowed himself a moment’s relief. 

Veronica emerged from the cabin a minute later, brandishing a captured pistol in her hand. A German Mauser C96. 

“I found th—“

“Thank you.” He took it from her, and with his other hand prepared to unmoor the boat. The Blossom twins rushed up the dock. No time. He shot through the ropes that fastened the vessel to the pier. 

The boat lurched and started out to sea, swaying precariously mid the deep and curving swells. Jason reached the end of the dock and jumped. And caught the end of the stern in one grasping hand and dragged himself aboard. Jughead swung the Mauser round and squeezed off a careless shot that went wide and lost itself in the wailing storm. 

Jason stalked towards him. 

The boat groaned and sputtered desperately, chugging away from the dock. Jughead saw Cheryl standing at the peak of the pier. Her eyes almost glowed in the dark. 

On the tenuous frontier where sea met heaven, Jughead witnessed the splitting seam of dawn as it sprang over the water. 

Jason fired the revolver and missed as well. Then he ducked behind the bridge while Jughead reeled and fired back. Veronica retreated towards the prow. 

Ten yards from the dock. Twenty. Thirty. No one at the wheel, and the boat listed dangerously in the violent sea. Then it stopped. Ground to a halt. 

“What happened?” Veronica cried over the soaking wind. 

“I don’t—“ Jughead’s nonexistent answer failed as Jason sprang up from cover and loosed another bullet. 

“The book!” he snarled, regular syntax and composition abandoned. “Mine! Give it to me!” 

“Go back to hell!” Jughead spit. And squeezed off another four rounds. The Mauser ran low. Then the reason for the boat’s sudden and sharp arrest became manifest, as the green, slimy claws crept up over the gunwale and some half a dozen Deep Ones strained to pull themselves aboard. Veronica screamed. She snatched up a convenient and vacant bucket, and hurled it at the nearest monster. The makeshift projectile struck him squarely in the ghoulish face, and he went tumbling back into the frothing water. Jughead wheeled around and shot one of the Deep Ones through the chest. A spray of black gore hissed on the foam and the thing lost its grip and followed its fellow back into the deep. 

They were difficult shots to make, especially as he was still holding the Necronomicon in his left hand, balanced against the pistol in the right.

One of the sea beasts crawled up into the boat and struck the deck with a wet, impactful crash like mud on stone. It scrabbled forward and he blew its brains out. But the things had distracted him successfully enough. 

“Jug—“ Veronica tried to call. And then she was gasping and choking, because Jason had shot her. He strolled towards Jughead, smoking gun turned skyward. 

Veronica collapsed back onto the deck, fumbling beneath her dress for the grievous wound just above her heart. Blood trickled out over the bodice. Jughead knelt beside her, and prepared to examine the injury. But he was of little assistance—because she sputtered twice, fixed him with her big dark eyes, and then breathed no more.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” He hardly had time to absorb the further horror, for then Jason was on him. Jughead spun up, trained the pistol directly on his foe’s abominable chest, and fired. 

And the chamber clicked empty. 

Jason reached forward, languidly snatched away the gun, and tossed it with a flourish into the grasping sea. 

Jughead retreated a few steps, until his knees knocked on the starboard gunwale just before the prow. The sun crept higher in the rear, and the black sea simmered light green. 

Jason stepped over the dead Deep One, and raised his revolver to finish the business. 

Jughead found himself with little recourse. The enervating power of utter defeat paralyzed his legs and his arms. He hardly noticed the fingers of his left hand wrapping round the spine of the Necronomicon like the rigorous hands of a corpse. Even in this state, all the energy that remained within his weary brain repurposed itself towards the denial of the book. The Blossoms would  _ not  _ have it.  _ Could  _ not. 

“Just give it up,” Jason said, very calm and satisfied. “It’s all over, lad.” 

“Come on!” Jughead seethed. “Come on! You want the book? Come and take it! Fight me like a goddamned man!” He wasn’t sure what effect appeals to manhood would have on a creature that was not really a man at all. But he had spent all alternative appeals. “Come on! Throw your gun away! Coward!”

Jason’s hand twitched in a slight moment of consideration. Then he smiled and likewise threw his revolver into the sea. It splashed briefly, glinted in the early sunlight, and then bubbled down into the dark water. A line of sleek, eager heads popped up in the water along the starboard side of the ship. The Deep Ones watched the contest, with little dread of the outcome. 

The waking sun flashed across Jason’s blue eyes. He closed his fists and adopted a combatant stance. Jughead did likewise. He stepped around Veronica’s corpse and prepared for the struggle.

Jughead gave the best account of himself that he could manage. But even had he not contended one-handed in his refusal to release the Necronomicon for even an instant, even had he not been the far inferior fighter, even had his opponent been a man and not a half-thing from beyond the farthest star, the day and the night preceding had so wasted him in body and spirit that his defeat was never in question. 

He went for a stiff haymaker, targeting Jason’s ribs. Jason dodged deftly and crashed a fist down on Jughead’s skull. He grunted against the explosion of brutal pain. Jason’s next blow caught him in the base of the chest and the air gushed from his lungs. Jughead threw another punch, and this one landed on Jason’s jaw. He felt skin split. Felt the vile ichor that passed for blood dribble out over his knuckles. And he could tell himself, if nothing else, that he  _ had  _ scored a hit. 

But Jason struck him with the left hand in the side of the head, and his ears rung. The next punch smashed him in the eye, and threw the world into shades of violent red and orange. He sputtered, holding the Necronomicon behind his back. Jughead went for another desperate punch, and wounded only the air.

“Thou losest labor!” Jason laughed.

Jughead tried to throw an elbow into the man’s gut, but he was easily rebuffed, and Jason’s knuckles connected with his jaw. He heard the terrible crack of bone and warm gore welled up behind his lips. He spat out shards of tooth and gouts of blood. Then Jason gripped him hard by the hair and smashed his skull into the gunwale. Another flash of lightning agony lit the nerves through his spine and out through the rest of him. Jason kicked him hard in the stomach, and he vomited blood and clumps of red saliva. 

He fell back on the deck, face red and bloody, hands weary and powerless. Then there was something vicious and leathery pressed into his throat. His eyes, opened, peered through the bloodied, faded haze. Jason stood over him in victory, the heel of his boot jamming into the tender muscle and cartilage of Jughead’s neck. He reached down and gripped the Necronomicon, and made to pull it from Jughead’s hand. Jughead held tight.

Jason ground his heel tighter into the fallen lad’s throat. Jughead fought for a breath and failed to draw one. Speckled darkness rallied at the edges of his vision. 

He dug his fingers into the Necrnomicon’s decaying leather, dug in with such strenuous effort that he felt his nails begin to split. The agony joined to the rest of the physical and psychic torment already wracking his bruised flesh, and so he ignored it. Jason pulled at the other end of the book. And meanwhile, he crushed Jughead’s throat beneath his boot, bidding him to just surrender the prize.

Jughead knew if Jason did not soon lift his foot, his trachea would be crushed, and he would suffocate anyhow. But let it be. He would not give over the book. Not when so many he cared for had perished in the interest of its destruction. Not while there was the sourest, palest breath left in him. 

The leathery heel crushed down with ever greater force. He felt the miserable book slip by inches from his tiresome grip. Jason yanked harder. Jughead held the Necronomicon now only by the very tips of his fingers and the nails caught in the crumbling spine. 

No.  _ No _ .

Should he lose the book, then it was all upon his head.  _ No _ .

But he could not breathe. He felt something crack and tear in his neck. The darkness round the edges of his vision deepened. His lungs cried out. Jason ground his heel cruelly down at that soft point where the jaw met the throat. 

“Jason…” trilled the voice.

And Cheryl walked up with a blissful tranquility to her brother’s side. Jughead did not know when or how she had come aboard. They had left her back on the dock, with some three hundred feet of ocean between them. But she was here, as haughty and lovely as ever.

The terrible sight was enough to swallow the last of his strength. 

And the book came free. Jason tore it away with a cry of delight. Jason took his boot from Jughead’s throat, and replanted it upon his chest. 

Jughead cried out in all the misery and shame of defeat. He had lost. Lost for himself. Lost for his dead friends. Lost for poor, noble Elizabeth and his broken riddle of a father. Lost for mankind. 

He wished the heel back in his throat. Wished Jason to simply smash the life out of him. That would be better. He prayed for death. He prayed that death would erase his cosmic failure and the shame of his loss. And the prayer went unanswered, as they always did. 

Cheryl embraced her brother, and they looked down on the Necronomicon with a deep and abiding love. The western sun shone full into their faces, and they were beautiful in their inhumanity. 

Then Jason smashed a boot down into Jughead’s face, and there was darkness.


	9. the case of Jughead Jones

The rest was strange, impertinent nightmares and opaque visions. Rolling oceans. Alien spires and colonnades in the blackest pits of the sea. Writhing, gelatinous things that crept in the substrate of the material world. The brittle gate rattling. And the great, splitting and joining spheres of Yog-Sothoth, filling the voids between worlds and readying to drag all that was into that eternal gulf of nothing. 

He watched Elizabeth Cooper die again and again, raising the gun at once against herself and against her father’s cruel curse of the blood. Veronica’s limp and ragged corpse sprawled out over the deck of the boat.

Jason’s heel in his throat. 

In the brief moments of lucidity that penetrated his febrile madness, he saw men in sterile coats and handling instruments of steel or rubber. He heard their stern, authoritative chatter. Sometimes he heard himself scream. He felt the soft walls of a room that was too small for him, and ate food that he did not want to eat.

But Jughead’s presence of mind returned only in full when he looked through the miserable haze and saw the kind, patient face of Archie Andrews staring back.

He forced his eyes wide. 

He was—there was a room. The walls were not stone or wood. Rather they were threaded a light, comforting red, almost pink. Cushioning of some kind. Archie sat in a chair near the door, which itself looked to be made of iron, save for the little glass portal at the top. 

The terrible reality impressed itself on him only with some moments. He tried to rise—and fell right back down onto the padded floor. Jughead moved to reach out for his friend, and found he could not move his arms. Because they were pulled and lashed tight against his trunk. 

He was in a straitjacket. 

“Archie,” he bleated. “Archie, oh God. Where am I? Where’s Betty? The book—I—“

“You’re awake!” Archie said with some relief. But Jughead could see his eyes were red. “Thank God!”

“Archie! Where am I?”

“The doctors were hoping if you saw me it would help you come back to us. But—“

“Archie,  _ where am I _ ?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No!” He tried to rise, but without the use of his arms, fell right back to the floor. 

“You’re in Machen State Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

“Criminally In—how long have I been here?”

“About two weeks? But you’ve barely been with us for any of it.”

“Cheryl!” He hissed. “Where’s Cheryl?” 

“Sh—she’s the one who had you brought here, Jug. After what happened that night? At the university? At the Cooper house? At Thornhill? On the boat?” 

“Why am I in a hospital for the criminally insane? What do you think I did? What did they tell you I  _ did _ ?” 

Jughead was thrown in a wave of nausea as he slowly realized what must have happened after that night. 

“Jug—“ Archie said. He raised a hand to his mouth, and Jughead was very nearly broken to see his big, burly friend stifle a sob. “You really don’t remember? You killed them.” 

And it came out what story Cheryl had spun for the authorities. That Jughead had gone mad, went and robbed Miskatonic University in search of some ancient, arcane book he wanted. Then he’d murdered Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Blossom, before killing Polly, Elizabeth, and Veronica as well. 

After Jason had knocked him unconscious on the boat, they must have had him remanded here. 

“Oh God—Cheryl—she’s lying!” Jughead gasped. “Please, she is  _ lying _ .”

“It breaks my heart what you did, Jughead,” Archie said, wiping away a tear. “But I know it wasn’t your fault. You’re sick—I just want you to get better. But the doctors say you can’t unless you  _ admit  _ what you did.” 

“I didn't  _ do  _ anything!" Jughead wailed, and then spilled his own tears. “Please—it was  _ Cheryl  _ and Jason, they—“

“Jughead,” Archie said, sternly. “Jason’s dead. You know that.”

“No! He’s alive again! If the man ever  _ was  _ dead! Except, he’s not a man at all. Some kind of—his Father, Cheryl’s Father, is the god Yog-Sothoth. Th—they never found Mr. Cooper’s or Betty’s bodies, did they?”

Archie shook his head. “The doctors were hoping you would tell me what you did with th—“

“I did  _ nothing  _ with them, because I didn’t  _ kill  _ them! The Deep Ones took them into the sea! Because they—“ he felt his mind protest the words in his mouth. “Oh God, they  _ were _ in  _ part  _ Deep Ones themselves! They found the deck of the boat covered in black slime, didn't they?”

“I—“ Archie looked a bit surprised. “Yeah. They did. I was there. Constable Keller thought it was oil at first bu—““

“It was blood. Of the fishmen. I shot one, right there. Before—“

“Jughead, _ there are no fishmen _ .  _ Please  _ try to think straight.” 

Jughead had a desperate and futile thought. “Look—it might not be too late. You have to stop them. Cheryl has it—the book,” Jughead gasped. “Before her child is born. You have to kill it. You have to destroy the Necron—“

“You’re talking about your own  _ unborn child _ , Jughead,” Archie half-gasped. 

“It’s  _ not  _ mine!” Jughead screamed. He tried once more to rise, and throwing himself against the walls of the cell, managed to get to his feet. “It’s  _ Jason’s _ ! And if the fucking thing is  _ born  _ then we’re  _ all  _ goddamned!”

He stalked towards Archie, who cringed away. 

“Ju—“

“Archie,  _ please _ . You  _ know  _ me. You  _ know  _ I’m not insane.  _ Listen  _ to me. Cheryl and Jason have the Necronomicon. They are going to use it to raise Cthulhu from R’lyeh, and he will throw open the gates for Yog-Sothoth, and then they will raise  _ all  _ the Old Ones from their sleep, and then we—“ his voice climbed into a keening screech, and he realized with some horror that he really  _ must  _ sound a madman. 

The doors opened. Two burly men in white single-breasted jackets stepped inside, gripped him forcibly by the shoulders, and yanked him away from his friend.

“I think you’d best go, Mr. Andrews,” said one of the orderlies. “But thank you for coming.”

Archie nodded, eyes sad and sunken.

“Goodbye, Jug,” he said. “I’ll come back. I promise.”

Jughead tried to throw himself towards Archie, as if he might rescue him from this impossible horror. The orderlies held him tight in their vice grip. Archie turned to go.

“Archie! Archie, please come back! Please, God! Listen to me!  _ Please _ ! Archie!” 

Archie’s footsteps vanished off down the hall. 

He lunged at the door. The orderlies wrestled him to the ground.

“Archie!” he cried, voice breaking like a young boy’s. “Archie, please don’t leave me!” The tears came again. “Archie!”

Another man stepped into the cell. He was taller than the pair already within, and slender, with a pointed and intellectual visage. In his left hand he held a heavy, hideous needle packed full of some revolting blue liquid.

The orderlies held Jughead fast against the floor. His breaths devolved into shattered, pained gasping. 

The third man, the doctor, he presumed, knelt down beside him, and dispassionately shoved the syringe into his throat. Jughead cried out, and the plunger slid down, and he felt a warm, humming current rush into his veins. A cloudy haze settled over him like a veil, and he was back in the kingdom of nightmares.

He did not know how long this latest bout of unconsciousness lasted. It might have been hours, or perhaps it was days. But when he woke again he was no longer in the padded cell. He was in a larger chamber, the walls ancient brick spider-webbed with aged fissures. And he was strapped tight to a wooden table, like a side of meat. His ankles and wrists bolted down tight, and some manner of wires stuck tight to his forehead and throat with a thin adhesive.

The doctor stood at the foot of his bed, flipping through some arcane journal. A small crew of orderlies bustled about, busying themselves with the operation of complex mechanical contraptions whose purpose Jughead could not divine, but which seemed to be the source of the wires stuck against his flesh.

“Where am I?” Jughead demanded. 

“Ah,” the doctor said, closing his journal. “You’re with us again, Mr. Jones. At last.”

“Who  _ are  _ you?” he begged.

“You don’t remember,” he sighed. “I’m Dr. Raymond. I’m sure I introduced myself to you when you were first brought to us, but you were in quite a state, then. Rambling about your gods and monsters.” He shook his head in condescending pity. “It is always a sad affair, to see a bright young man as yourself fall prey to such powerful delusion.”

“Delusion? Goddammit I’m  _ not  _ mad!” 

“With all due respect, Mr. Jones,” said Dr. Raymond. “That is a  _ very  _ common protestation of the…mentally unwell.” 

“I’m  _ not  _ insane! The Blossom twins. They—“

“Yes, yes. You may not recall, but you have regaled us with your story countless times since your admission here. You believe your fiancée, Ms. Blossom, and her deceased brother to be the children of this terrible god you term ‘Yog-Sothoth’. You believe a race of mermen called the ‘Deep Ones’ dwell off the reef in your own town of Riverdale. You believe your friend, Ms. Cooper, was descended from these creatures, and slew  _ herself  _ to escape the curse in her blood. You believe these ‘Deep Ones’ long ago made a pact with the Blossoms, and that together they conspired to raise a race of ancient gods who had once ruled the earth to rule once more and wipe away mankind. You believe your own father narrowly  _ defeated  _ one of these ‘Old Ones’ in the South Pacific, some years ago. You believe the Blossoms, and the ‘Deep Ones’ to be responsible for the tragic slayings you committed in your altered state. It is a riveting story, Mr. Jones, and I say without a hint of irony that perhaps fiction would be a good outlet for your darker passions. We may explore therapy of that sort at a later time.”

“God damn you!” Jughead spat, struggling vainly against his bonds. “‘Therapy’! I don’t need to be made well because I’m not sick! You fools—“

“There  _ is  _ a curse of the blood, Mr. Jones,” Raymond said. “Unfortunately, it’s yours. Your father was a drunk with a disposition towards violence. Sadly, it seems such predilections have proved congenital. But I am an optimist, and I believe even the most deep seated of disorders can be treated.” 

“Don’t speak of my father,” Jughead snarled. And along with the panic and the despair came a fresh wave of guilt. God, his father. His  _ father _ . Imperfect, oceans away from perfect, but  _ he had tried _ . FP Jones had died in the interest of the human race. By the hand of his own son, who had without cognizance fought for its destruction. The tears renewed themselves. 

“Calm yourself, Mr. Jones,” Raymond said peaceably.

“What is  _ this _ ?” Jughead demanded, motioning with his unrestrained head to the table he was fastened to and the mess of wires around them.

“An experimental therapy, courtesy of my European colleagues. The theory—which I believe to be perfectly sound—is that the baser parts of the brain governing motor control and the higher functions responsible for such wild delusions as yours are in tension. And through the inducement of seizure by means of electric shock, we might come a step closer to dislodging these fantasies.” 

“Are you going to—oh, God!”

“Ready!” called one of the orderlies. 

Dr. Raymond nodded. 

An orderly operated a trigger and flipped a lever on one of the inscrutable machines. The wires adhering to his face and neck buzzed and a blast of electric power surged through Jughead’s pliable muscles and plucked at the marrow in his bones. He screamed and screamed and arched his back hard against the wooden board beneath him in sheer, blasting agony. His spasms served only to intensify the pain, and his whole world became a brutal, crackling blue. 

And then the machine was off, and the shock subsided. He whimpered and sobbed, tears trickling down his cheeks. 

“Painful, I know,” Dr. Raymond sighed, with affected distaste. “But recovery is rarely a comfortable process. You  _ must  _ understand: there are no ‘Deep Ones’. There is no ‘Great Cthulhu’ and no ‘City of R’lyeh’. There is no ‘Yog-Sothoth’.” 

Jughead swallowed a few sobs and then burst into a mad giggling whose origin he hardly understood himself.

“You fucking fools,” he laughed, eyes rolling crazily in his skull. “The sky is going to crack open. You and everyone on this planet are going to die screaming! Because you didn’t  _ listen  _ to me! You fuck—“

“Once more,” Raymond said dispassionately. 

And the orderly hit the switch again. And all was surging electric pain again.

* * *

So passed the weeks and then the months. Jughead soon gave up any attempts to convince doctors or visitors of what he knew to be so. Clearly, it was futile.

He learned that Hermione Lodge, blaming him entirely for the loss of her daughter, had pushed for him to be judged sane, in the hopes of securing a sentence of death. This was staid in part by the forceful testimony of Archie and Fred Andrews, along with Terrence Tate, who insisted he had never shewn any signs of sadism or violence in the past, and so his recent homicidal madness must be the result of some slumbering illness in his blood, over which he held no sway. 

He wished dearly she’d gotten her way.

Every week it was that horrible table and the electric shocks. Or the sessions in which it was drilled into his skull again and again that there  _ were  _ no Old Ones. There  _ was _ no Yog-Sothoth. There  _ were _ no fishmen.

He could have given them what they wanted. But he would not. Because he was  _ not mad _ .

He considered suicide often enough. It was hard to effect, as the walls were padded so that he would not crack his skull on stone or wood. And his hands usually bound fast in the jacket, so he could not chew up his own wrists. And something besides that held him back.

Archie came to visit him regularly, at least once a month. Jughead was almost hurt by the loyalty of his friend. Archie believed fully that he had killed the Coopers, killed Veronica, killed Clifford and Penelope, and killed his own father (and in fairness, he  _ had _ killed FP). But he said it was not Jughead’s fault, and that ‘there was no sense in losing him, too’. 

Some three months after his initial commitment to the asylum, Archie told him Cheryl had given birth to a healthy baby boy. Of course, there had hardly been enough time in the pregnancy, had she been carrying an ordinary human child. Jughead did not even presume to question the impossibility of that. What did it matter? He was mad. No one cared what he had to say. Those who might have were dead. And he might have not slain them by his own hand, but it was his fault nonetheless. 

“What did she name him?” Jughead asked.

“Siegfried,” Archie said surely.

Jughead laughed. His friend did not get the joke. Of course not. No one but him and Cheryl (and Jason, he supposed) might have gotten it. He just laughed, and wondered what the boy’s childhood would be like. Wondered how old he would be before mother and father (doubling as aunt and uncle) took him aside and told him it was time to invite dear Grandfather in from the void. 

About a year after his initial consignment to this madhouse, he got something of an answer.

His first alert that something was amiss came when the great guard dog down in the courtyard went mad. The big mastiff (nicknamed ‘Fenris’ by him), with jaws large enough to encompass an adult man’s head, was in normal times a composed animal of almost gentle disposition. At worst, he was prickly.

And yet today, the sturdy old dog became a mad beast. Jughead heard the baleful howls through the barred window of his cell. The barking, ravening snarls and the clinking of his chain as Fenris desperately protested his bonds to assault whatever awful menace had come onto the grounds.

He did not cease his caterwauling until whoever this odd visitor was had long entered the gate and the building, on which Fenris’ violent roaring settled into a pitiable whimpering.

Only a minute later, a pattering of footfalls crept down the hall towards his cell. All along the corridor, the inmates prone to bouts of shrieking or weeping sent up a symphony of deathly cries to chill the stoutest spirit. Crying, howling, praying. Jughead pressed himself up against the far wall of his cell and shuddered. 

“Shut up!” barked an orderly, to no avail.

He prayed the footfalls would pass him by.

They did not.

An orderly opened his cell.

“Visitors, Jones,” he said sourly.

That was odd, because the only visitors he ever received were Archie or reporters (who he chased off without exception). And Archie had only just come some days ago. And the orderly spoke of ‘visitors’, plural.

So the orderly stepped aside and in she came.

Jughead did not know whether to back himself far against the rear of the cell as he could, or throw himself at her with the intent of ripping out her throat. 

Cheryl stepped gingerly into the cell with the same preternatural grace she’d always possessed. She wore another of her firm, slim black dresses, and a broad-brimmed hat girded with silk flowers, a decade out of fashion. 

Jughead fixed her with as hateful a glare as he could muster.

“Hello, darling,” she said.

“Why are you here?” he managed to beg at last. “ _ Why _ ?”

Her response was to lean back out into the hall and call: “Sigi!” 

And in came his second visitor. A child, a boy who looked to be about three or four years of age. He came just up to Cheryl’s hips, a mop of soft copper hair framing a round and gentle face whose cherubic cast ought to have been charming. But there was an air of animal horror around him, and Jughead knew with an instant why Fenris had gone mad, and why the other inmates howled. The boy’s skin held a seemingly permanent deathly pallor, much fairer than either of his parents. Beneath that thin and alien hide, Jughead could see the sliding, branching tracks of dark veins, less blue and red than nearly black. He was a thin child, the sort who looked like he might grow into a man of letters. Siegfried watched Jughead through great, sensitive dark eyes, so dark the iris and the pupil melted together. 

Jughead knew, well as he knew anything, that this boy took more after his Grandfather than did either of his parents. 

“Get that  _ thing  _ away from me!” Jughead hissed.

Siegfried’s dark eyes glinted with a dreadful and cosmic intelligence. He wrapped his thin little arms around his mother’s waist, and Cheryl rubbed his shoulder. 

Then she closed the door behind them, before the orderly could protest. 

“He’s a  _ child _ , Jughead,” Cheryl crooned. “And you’ll hurt his feelings.” 

Jughead breathed, feral and terrified. 

“Why have you come?”

“In truth?” Cheryl leaned up against the padded wall. “To see you once more.” 

“Why?” Jughead croaked. And on seeing her, something else moved in his breast. Another parcel of grief. He still did not know if he had ever loved her. But he had been fond of her, at least. He had even trusted her, in an odd sense. And by God, he’d destroyed the world for her. 

“Call it sentimentality. I suppose I really do have more humanity in me than I’d like. For now, anyways.” She smiled sadly. Siegfried clung tenaciously to his mother. “I guess I did grow fond of you. Fond as I could, in any case. By the measures of mankind, you  _ are  _ a good man. A bright one. I did enjoy our talks. And I appreciate your taste in literature, as it were.”

“And so you had me locked up in a madhouse.” 

“Jason did, actually. I would have killed you that day on the shore. I know it’s what you yourself would have preferred. But my brother is…a vindictive sort. You know that. And he’s a jealous bastard. I don’t think he could stand the fact you’d ever touched me at all.” 

“Oh? How is Jason, by the way? Still pretending to be dead?”

“For the time,” she said. “He won’t have to for much longer.” 

“Why? Why do you want to do this? Don’t you care  _ anything  _ for this world at all? Don’t you feel anything for—“ 

“What you see, here,” Cheryl said. “This ‘Cheryl Blossom’ is a very small part of  _ me,  _ you understand? Only the merest part of me is matter in any way you can understand it. There is  _ much  _ more of me. Much more of me that I cannot express under the petty, cheap Newtonian constraints of this world. I want to be free. And if I have to sweep aside a few billion lesser things for that to be so, then so  _ be  _ it. That’s the way of nature—even of  _ your  _ kind. So the Romans dealt with the Gauls and the Britons. So the white man did to the Indians. And so the Old Ones will do to man.  _ Vae Victis _ . Might is right, in the end.” 

“How old is that boy?” Jughead demanded.

“He’s a year, give or take.”

“No. That child is three years old at least.”

“Sigi has much of his Grandfather in him,” Cheryl smiled. “He’s grown remarkably fast, hasn’t he? Jason is a terribly proud father.” 

“Just go,” Jughead begged. “Please, in the name of God, let me in peace.” 

“I will.”

“And for God’s sake, don’t be slack with your damned apocalypse. Get it over with.” 

Her dark eyes traced the turbulent sky outside. 

“Soon enough,” she sighed with a romantic longing. “The stars are nearly right.”

“Then Grandfather will come,” said Siegfried with a deep and childlike joy.

“Right, my love,” Cheryl cooed, tousling his silky red hair. “So the earth shall be our footstool and the soul of time our slave.” Then back to Jughead, who still lay half-seated against the far wall of his cell, just beneath the window. “Take comfort in this: for once, the madman howling of old gods and devils in his cell is right. And all these…men of reason and order who laugh at you…they’ll see soon enough.” 

“Damn you.” 

“I’ve a parting gift, for you.” 

“Parting gif—“

“You met my Father once. I doubt you’re eager to do so again.”

Jughead remembered the barest glimpse of Yog-Sothoth’s eternal power and glory, the spheres that subdivided and joined and outshone the billion pendant suns of the universe. He remembered the deep and terrible cosmic dread, the horrible reality revealed to him of just how worthless and insignificant he truly was. 

“No. I—“

“Then here’s my gift. A chance to make your exit before mankind at large does so. A means to miss the end.” 

Cheryl reached into her bodice and withdrew something sleek and shining. She tossed it leisurely across the room and it landed on Jughead’s heaving chest. It was a straight razor, half-opened. In the dim moonlight pouring through the window, its light was friendly and nearly inviting.

“Down the wrists,” Cheryl said. “Or across the throat if you’re bold enough. Just don’t let the orderlies catch sight of it.” She tipped her broad hat, and took Siegfried by the hand. “Goodbye, Jughead. And thank you. For everything.” 

And in the lonesome darkness of his cell, Jughead contemplated the fine little razor. 


End file.
